Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It

The product of a unique collaboration between a pioneering earth scientist and an award winning science writer, "Fixing Climate" takes an unconventional approach to the vitally important issue of global warming. Wallace S. Broecker, a long time researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, warned about the possible consequences of global warming decades before the concept entered popular consciousness. Hooked on climate studies since his student days, he has learned, largely through his own findings, that climate changes - naturally, dramatically, and rarely benignly.He also knows from experience that when mankind pushes nature as we are currently doing by dumping some sixty to seventy million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day, climate will change even more dramatically and less benignly. As Broecker points out, if a well-meaning fairy godmother were to turn us all into energy saving paragons at the stroke of midnight tonight, the resulting reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide might lessen but could not turn aside the great warming tide now headed our way. There is, nonetheless, a glimmer of hope in the development of new technologies that are directed not only at the reduction of carbon dioxide output but also at its harmless disposal. Told by skilled science journalist Robert Kunzig, "Fixing Climate" is a timely and informative story that makes for riveting reading.