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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Missed Opportunity to Broker Peace, September 7, 2009
This review is from: Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and Our Energy Future (Hardcover)
When interpretations of scientific evidence differ radically and acrimoniously, you can be certain that the interest of at least one of the parties is not a better understanding of what makes things tick in the natural world. Whether the topic is the heliocentric solar system, descent with modification, or rapid climate change, rarely are the scientific facts themselves a matter of contention. Edmond Mathez' book is a case in point.
The true value in Mathez' book is his treatment of the carbon cycle and the complexity of the interrelationships between the atmosphere, the lithosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, and the cryosphere. Mathez' packaging of these topics for the scientifically literate reader, complete with illustrations, is masterful. Once Mathez equips us with the necessary vocabulary and the conceptual framework, he takes us back into deep geologic time to experience "climates past." Here we learn how carbon cycle disequilibria have created millennia of glacial and interglacial cycles, and we learn where we are in the present interglacial. And he shows the complexities and limitations of the climate models designed to forecast our destiny.
Mathez describes the three types of irregularities in the Earth's orbit which interact to create Milankovitch cycles, which explain much of the naturally-occurring cyclicality in Earth's' historic climate. He also describes the naturally-occurring accelerators, principally the polar albedo effect and water vapor, as well as the climate system's balancing factors.
One of the most startling of the historic cycles is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), some 55 million years ago, which the author states "is analogous to resent-day climate change." During the Paleocene, climate had been slowly warming, but then a sudden, enormous mass of carbon flooded the ocean and atmosphere. During the PETM, 1,500 to 4,500 gigatons (billion metric tons) of carbon entered the Earth's climate system. This influx of carbon increased the Earth's temperature by 9 to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, about the amount of carbon and temperature we'd expect at current levels of anthropogenic carbon production. Another startling precedent was the Younger Dryas, only about 12,900 years ago, which in the space of only 1,300 years increased the Earth's temperature some 13 degrees Fahrenheit. The Younger Dryas warming period does not appear, however, to have been caused by an increase in carbon, but to a sudden decrease in the salinity of the oceans.
The author shows that in the last 100 thousand years there have been 23 naturally-occurring warm periods, the last of them causing the current increases in atmospheric and hydrospheric temperatures which account for the retreating glaciers. It is clear that with humans introducing some 36 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually, the current rate of naturally-occurring warming can only accelerate.
Edmond Mathez, provides all of this information, and more, yet he fails to draw the key conclusion which could have easily brokered a peace between partisans in the climate debate. Why doesn't he state unequivocally that there are both natural and anthropogenic causes to the current interglacial warming period and that climate research should focus on quantifying the percentages of each? Of course it makes sense for humans to reduce carbon emissions, but won't the impact of any reductions depend on the relative impact of our emissions? That is a question that Mathez curiously leaves unanswered.
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