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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
Book Description
Watch out for natural climate change. From warm to cold, wet to dry, it doesn't behave the way scientists thought it did. A drastic climate shift more sudden and troublesome than we'd ever imagined could already be underway.
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 a general public that is already intensely curious about what science has to say on the topic.
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