The long thaw : how humans are changing the next 100,000 years of Earth's climate /
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| Author / Creator: | Archer, David, 1960- |
|---|---|
| Imprint: | Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, c2009. |
| Description: | ix, 180 p. : ill., maps ; 22 cm. |
| Language: | English |
| Series: | Science essentials Science essentials (National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)) |
| Subject: | |
| Format: | Print Book |
| URL for this record: | http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/7469117 |
Table of Contents:
- Acknowledgments xi
- Prologue
- Global Warming in Geologic Time
- An overview of the thrust of the book: human-induced climate change in the context of geologic time, in the past and in the future
- Section I. The Present
- Chapter 1. The Greenhouse Effect
- Fourier and greenhouse theory Early CO 2 measurements Arrhenius and the forecast
- Climate science since then
- Chapter 2. We've Seen It with Our Own Eyes
- Testing the forecast Impacts already
- Chapter 3. Forecast of the Century
- A century-timescale climate spike Temperature, rainfall, sea level, and storms
- Section II. The Past
- Chapter 4. Millennial Climate Cycles
- Abrupt climate transitions, and climate cycles on millennial timescales
- The Little Ice Age and the Medieval Optimum climates
- Chapter 5. Glacial Climate Cycles
- History of their discovery Ice flows and melts in quirky ways
- Orbital forcing and CO 2 forcing
- Chapter 6. Geologic Climate Cycles
- Our ice age is unusual
- The Earth is breathing
- Chapter 7. The Present in the Bosom of the Past
- Climate change so far and in the coming century, compared with deglaciation, abrupt climate change, the Eocene hothouse, the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum event, and the K/T boundary
- Section III. The future
- Chapter 8. The Fate of Fossil Fuel CO 2 Reservoirs of carbon, breathing
- New carbon from fossil fuels equilibrates with the ocean and the land
- Chapter 9. Acidifying the Ocean
- CO 2 is an acid CaCO 3 is a base
- Neutralization takes millennia
- CO 2 remains higher than natural for hundreds of millennia
- Chapter 10. Carbon Cycle Feedbacks
- The short-term prognosis
- The long-term prognosis
- Chapter 11. Sea Level in the Deep Future
- If the past is the key to the future, we have the capacity to raise sea level by 50 meters, eventually
- Chapter 12. Orbits, CO 2 , and the Next Ice Age
- Interplay between orbital and CO 2 climate forcings
- The next ice age is about to be canceled
- Epilogue: Carbon Economics and Ethics
- What the options are and how we decide
- Further Reading
- Index
