perhaps involve people and ease their tensions is knowing which particular locations will be affected, and how they can begin to prepare themselves. It is towards this difficult question that the following question turns.VI. REGIONAL AND LOCAL EFFECTS OF CLIMATIC CHANGEMaking any specific or even generalised claims about regional and local climate changes is even more controversial than the effects of climate change at large. Existing lakes and inland seas do have some measurable effects on temperature and humidity in the ribbon of land along their shores, but no so large and so widespread as ordinarily to justify creating new ones as climatic generators. The same type of controversy surrounds the desertification of land. Looking to the cases of the desertification of the middle east, northern Africa, and India, it is argued that overgrazing by livestock both raised the albedo of the surface and injected dust into the air; thus altering the regional heat balance by reflecting away more solar radiation. A net cooling from these processes then promoted atmospheric stability and suppressed rainfall; the vegetation withered under the lessened rainfall and more dust swirled upward, magnifying the original impact. The example of the diminishing rainforests provides another good, though controversial, case. As has been witnessed in these regions to some degree, changing the earths physical landscape can have affects on microclimates. Cities, too, have witnessed some significant climatic changes as a result of increased urbanisation. The well-known heat island effect; i.e., a net elevation of temperatures above those found in the adjacent countryside, has been well documented. It stems particularly from changes in the land surface and the energy budget. Cities themselves generate much of the heat in which they bask or swelter. The roughness of the urban land surface retards the speed of the winds, and thus lessens the dispersion...
