The literature on climate change from an enhanced greenhouse effect is large and growing rapidly. The problems considered are increasingly interdisciplinary. For these reasons many workers will find useful pointers to the literature in the fields interacting with, but outside of, their own. We present here an annotated bibliography on issues relating to changes in the concentrations of Earth's greenhouse gases. The areas covered include theory and numerical modelling of climate change; cycles involving carbon dioxide and other radiatively important trace gases; observations of climate change and the problems associated with those observations; paleoclimatology as it relates to previous changes in the greenhouse gases; the impacts on and interactions with managed and natural ecosystems from climate change; policy issues related to climate change and to the limitation of climate change; history of the study of the greenhouse effect; and some other causes of climate change. Selection of papers has been made to facilitate rapid introduction to most of the important issues and findings in an area. Over 600 articles, reports, and books are discussed.

In our original comment [Risbey et al.., 1991] we argued that the work of Schlesinger and Jiang [1991a] is too limited to determine whether or not (as they put it) “the penalty is small for a 10‐year delay in initiating the transition to a regime in which greenhouse‐gas emissions are reduced.” In their reply, Schlesinger and Jiang [1991b] (hereafter S&J) presented their reasons for concluding definitively that the penalty is small. However S&J's discussion of the evidence and literature on climate change and greenhouse warming contains significant omissions and mis‐statements.In dismissing our concern that their model was too simple to evaluate the possibility of abrupt climate change, S&J rely on results from coupled ocean‐atmosphere general circulation models (GCMs), in particular the work of Cubasch et al.. [1991]. Here S&J make two claims, one of which is incorrect and the other questionable. First, they claim that “the coupled atmosphere‐ocean model of Cubasch et al. [1991] does allow the nonlinearities that Risbey et al.. [1991] criticize our simple model for not including.” In fact we explicitly mentioned changes in polar ice caps [Oerlemans and van der Veen, 1984] and release of methane from clathrates [MacDonald, 1990; Bell, 1982], neither of which are included in the model of Cubasch et al.. [1991]. Indeed, none of the published simulations of global warming using coupled ocean‐atmosphere GCMs include these effects. Nor do these models yet include in their enhanced greenhouse simulations many of the possible feedbacks involving the carbon cycle and biosphere [Lashof, 1989; Bacastow and Maier‐Reimer, 1990; Sellers, 1987] that could significantly alter greenhouse gas concentrations and surface properties. The published simulations with these models do allow for some changes in deep ocean circulation and cloud behavior, but there is controversy over whether they correctly represent these processes [Marotzke, 1991; Mitchell, 1989; Cess, 1990]. In addition the coupled models must be arbitrarily tuned (requiring substantial artificial fluxes of heat and moisture) to get the current climate right [Manabe et al.., 1991; Cubasch et al.., 1991]. Their greenhouse change simulations are at least partly constrained by these flux adjustments.

In recent years, debate has intensified over whether to act now or delay actions that would reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. In a recent contribution to this debate in Nature, Schlesinger and Jiang [1991] conclude that “the penalty is small for a 10‐year delay in initiating the transition to a regime in which greenhouse‐gas emissions are reduced.” This conclusion is premature, since these authors did not consider a number of pertinent factors.Schlesinger and Jiang used a simple energy‐ balance climate model with an upwelling‐ diffusion ocean to examine the surface temperature response to transitions between various Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [Houghton et al., 1990] trace gas scenarios. They found that “a delay of 10 years in initiating a 20‐year transition from the IPCC [business as usual] scenario to any other IPCC scenario has only a small effect on the projected warming in 2100.” From this they concluded that “the penalty for a 10‐year delay is small.” We offer several reasons why we think this is a non sequitur.