As scientists carefully search for clues in the sun and storm patterns from our distant, past, they are gradually writing a new history of Earth's climate. Layers extracted from cores drilled into glaciers and ice sheets, sediments collected from the shores of lakes and oceans, and growth rings exposed in ancient corals and trees all tell the same surprising story. It is now apparent that alterations in our climate can happen quickly and dramatically. Physical evidence reveals that centuries of slow, creeping climate variations have actually been punctuated by far more rapid changes. While this new paradigm represents a significant shift in our picture of Earth's past, the real question is what it means for our future. Many researchers are now quietly abandoning the traditional vision of a long, slow waltz of slumbering ice ages and more temperate periods of interglacial warming. While they've long recognized the threats posed by global warming, they must now consider that the natural behavior of our climate is perhaps a greater threat than we'd imagined. And though there is no need for immediate alarm, the fact that changes in our climate can happen much more quickly than we'd originally thought--perhaps in the course of a human lifetime--makes it clear that science has a lot of questions to answer in this area. What are the mechanisms for triggering a significant climate change? In what ways should we expect this change to manifest itself? When will it likely happen? Climate Crash seeks to answer these questions, breaking the story of rapid climate change to general public that is already intensely curious about what science has to say on the topic.
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*Starred Review* Several good recent books, such as Richard B. Alley's Two-Mile Time Machine (2000) and Spencer R. Weart's Discovery of Global Warming(2003), have considered various aspects of radical climate change. Cox's overview covers those books' main topics and others. Each chapter has a particular focus. The first limns the original field research on polar ice, which occurred as part of a 1930 expedition to Greenland directed by the father of plate tectonics, Albert Wegener, who died, a victim of the cold, during it. The second concerns the 1930s discovery of a severe cold period directly preceding the last 12,800 years of the Holocene epoch. Succeeding chapters follow different avenues of subsequent research and theory, which together paint a dauntingly complex portrait of climate change. Abrupt shifts are common, and civilizations have perished during geologically "short" but deadly cold spells. The two chapters on the plethora of theories and of possible climatological causative factors make the most formidable reading, but the last chapter, "Surprises," which cites evidence indicative of an approaching cold-shift and cautions that not enough is known to say whether human action, such as artificially increasing greenhouse gases, could push-start it, is the most provocative. Alley's book had a similarly cautionary conclusion and was just as well written, but Cox's more summary work is the book to read first and to circulate to the most readers. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily apparent in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica... global climate is moving in a direction that makes abrupt climate change more probable... and the consequences of ignoring this may be large."
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
52 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Earth's Climate Flip-Flops More Than Any Politician,
By Bruce Crocker "agnostictrickster" (Whittier, California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Climate Crash: Discovering Rapid Climate Change and What It Means to Our Future (Hardcover)
Even though the subtitle of the book is "Abrupt Climate Change and What It Means for Our Future" [in which the author does a good job at showing why the future of our planet's climate is still unknown and possibly unknowable], the real importance of John D. Cox's Climate Crash is the book's detailed description of at least 80 years of research on the past climates of the planet Earth. Cox, a science journalist well versed in the earth sciences, shows step-by-step how scientists have arrived at the conclusion that the Earth's climate can shift very quickly [on scales of years or decades] from state to state. This is important information for anybody interested in the current scientific and political debates concerning the future of our planet's climate. My only complaint is that the book contains a few typos [In chapter 1, we meet Alfred Lohar Wegener, but at the beginning of chapter 3, he's Alfred Wegner. I'm sure the ghost of Alfred Lothar Wegener doesn't mind - it's nice to see him mentioned in a context other than plate tectonics.] If you read this book and then you still think that NOT dealing with the level of anthropogenic greenhouse gases is an okay way to go, you're a much braver person than I am! I enjoyed Climate Crash immensely and recommend it to anyone with an interest in climatology, geology, polar research, or the scientific method.
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Providing Context for Climate Change,
By
This review is from: Climate Crash: Discovering Rapid Climate Change and What It Means to Our Future (Hardcover)
Despite the title of this book, which I'm sure must have been chosen by the publisher to sell the book, this is an extremely clear and well written account of the evidence for abrupt climate change in ice cores, ocean floor sediments, and the like. That sounds boring, but the book is anything but. I read it twice in succession because it does such a great job of providing the context for understanding current issues in climate science, and because the story is written in such a compelling fashion. Cox is a science journalist, and a good one. The book is pitched, I think, for someone who has had some science courses in college, but requires no specialized knowledge of climate science. I've been replacing all the light bulbs in my house with compact florescents ever since I read this excellent book!
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Startling even for seasoned climate junkies,
By Chaxelle (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Climate Crash: Discovering Rapid Climate Change and What It Means to Our Future (Hardcover)
This erudite journalist, (yes they do exist), has compiled the history of paleoclimatology into a highly readable and even exciting text. Following the progress of the science right on up to 2003 reads like a novel. The science's big discovery is that climate is not a big stasis machine slowly going from ice ages to warm periods and back again. Rather, confirmed proxy data reveal natural changes to have been abrupt, a decade or two, and frequent particularly during the ice ages on a global scale as well as during the present era on a regional scale.
The historical curves are a series of spikes rather than a smooth sine wave. Forcing causes are unknown but immediate causes have been identified. Climate history shows a chaotic system, not a linear one, which throws into question whether or not future climate can even be predicted. Are there feedback loops of large significance? What are the initiators? Nature behaves like this on its own but there is no doubt that man's influence is there as well. Climate Change, Regions, Land Use and the many ways that man influences climate... these should be our focus and not the political term, global warming, with its sole focus on carbon dioxide. This book will give you a whole new understanding of climate
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