A PERSPECTIVE FROM THE HUMANITIES-SCIENCE BOUNDARY - INTRODUCTION

The articles in this special issue range across such influences on cli mate as solar emissions, orbital precession, atmosphere, oceans, and p recipitation, and generally approach, each in some context, human impl ications of these phenomena. The common underlying theme of all of the papers is the effect the phenomena have on radiation balance as measu red by global average temperature. This introductory paper undertakes a formulation of radiation balance theory that makes it serviceable to students of regional science. The objective is to go beyond inference of cause and effect by correlation to causal accounts of cause and ef fect through regional climatic and cultural processes. This is accompl ished primarily by revisualization of the energy system with regions a s dependent spatiotemporal entities, and temporally through a protocol for regional episode definition.