The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate (Science Essentials)
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ISBN13: 9780691136547Condition: NEWNotes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
If you think that global warming means slightly hotter weather and a modest rise in sea levels that will persist only so long as fossil fuels hold out (or until we decide to stop burning them), think again. In The Long Thaw, David Archer, one of the world's leading climatologists, predicts that if we continue to emit carbon dioxide we may eventually cancel the next ice age and raise the oceans by 50 meters. By comparing the global warming projection for the next century to natural climate changes of the distant past, and then looking into the future far beyond the usual scientific and political horizon of the year 2100, Archer reveals the hard truths of the long-term climate forecast. Archer shows how just a few centuries of fossil-fuel use will cause not only a climate storm that will last a few hundred years, but dramatic climate changes that will last thousands. Carbon dioxide emitted today will be a problem for millennia. For the first time, humans have become major players in shaping the long-term climate. In fact, a planetwide thaw driven by humans has already begun. But despite the seriousness of the situation, Archer argues that it is still not too late to avert dangerous climate change--if humans can find a way to cooperate as never before. Revealing why carbon dioxide may be an even worse gamble in the long run than in the short, this compelling and critically important book brings the best long-term climate science to a general audience for the first time.
Spotlight Customer Reviews:
Summary:
We won't survive for next thousand years? Really?
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Comment:
Since Amazon.com doesn't have an alternative option of not-rating any book, I have to give this one star, nothing to do with the book itself. The one star goes to this ridiculous assertion by the Publishers Weekly in the review of this book: His models, though conservative, imply that humans won't survive the environmental consequences of severe warming over the next thousand years.
So, to the reviewer of PW, how did the humanity, our ancestors, survived for nearly 2 million years under the harshest climate changes?
Ummm.... we adapted?
BUZZ! You gotcha, pardner!
So are we going to spend the next thousand years worrying and whining about the "environmental consequences of severe warming"?
Did you know, by 2150, we might be building USS Enterprises or space arks, goes out to the stars, wave bye-bye to Earth and thanks for all the fishes?
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Summary:
Not for beginners
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Comment:
The Long Thaw is not an easy read,some basic chemistry is helpful.
This book does not explain global warming in comfortable terms but it does explain how we got ourselves in this position and how long it will take to get back to a balanced system.
My main critisism is not having the charts on the same page as the references,this makes for a lot of page turning for the average reader.
Once the reader gets his or her head around science the book becomes a fascinating read,it won't scare you but it will,or should,make you aware of the pressure we as consumers, are putting on the system.
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Summary:
Best Scientific Overview
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Comment:
On the back cover is a quote from James Hansen: "This is the best book about carbon dioxide and climate change that I have read." I was doubtful before reading it, but after reading it, I definitely agree. I think it is very well written and easy to read, especially for a complex subject like climate science.
You can get bits and pieces of this information from other books, but no book that I have read puts everything together like this one does. And I have read over 20 books dealing with global warming and climate science. Other books dwell too long on relatively insignificant (to me) details, such as the lives of the people who discovered certain key things, or they look at only a narrow part of the timeline. This book goes farther into the past and future than any other I've read.
For example, in other books or articles I have read vague statements about CO2 lasting a long time in the atmosphere. Sometimes they will say much of the CO2 we release now will still be in the atmosphere 50 or 100 years from now. But they usually don't say how much and never talk about longer periods. This book explains how oceans will absorb most of the excess CO2 (70-85%) over a period of roughly 300 years, and over a period of roughly 5,000 years CO2 reacting with CaCO3 will absorb roughly half of the remainder, and then weathering (reacting with igneous rocks) will absorb the rest over a period of about 400,000 years. The time scales depend on how much of each greenhouse gas is released by us and by positive feedbacks. For example, the reaction with CaCO3 could last between 2,000 and 10,000 years. Average global temperature will stay near its peak for roughly 1000 years and will take hundreds of thousands of years to return completely to normal.
Another example: I knew that there are climate cycles caused by different aspects of the earth's orbit, and I had read about other things that affect CO2 concentrations and global average temperature. But this book puts orbital cycles, geologic processes, and the melting and freezing of ice sheets and related feedbacks into context, showing how each operates of very different time scales.
If you want the most complete, concise (only about 175 pages), and clear explanation of climate science to date, this is the best book to get.
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Summary:
Take Your Climate Knowledge to the Next Level
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Comment:
Archer gives a very unbiased straightforward account of how humans are in the process of changing the climate, and how that will affect this planet in this century, and for the next 100,000 years and beyond. Highly recommended for anyone looking to take their climate knowledge to the next level. It's not poetry, it is after all a scientific book, but Archer has a knack for getting you to keep turning the page.
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Summary:
disappointing
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Comment:
I'm reviewing the Kindle version. The author's style made this a tedious reading experience. Each chapter seems to repeat/rehash previous material. Attempts to be conversational seem to ring false. In some places, it seems as if the author verbally dictated, rather than wrote, the text; it just doesn't flow well. A editor's touch seems to be missing. The outline of the book: present, past, future is a little strange. Even while accepting the underlying science of AGW, and most of the scientific history presented in the book, I'm afraid that this book is not "the compelling global warming book" that I was hoping that it would be. To be cynical, it seems to be a book thrown together to capitalize on reader interest in one of the top science topics of the day.
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