Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate by William F. Ruddiman  (19)
$12.21
|
This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime, but millions of other items are. Join Amazon Prime today. Already a member? Sign in.
|
||||||||||||
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In the summer of 1995, Chicagoans endured weather of extremes they had never seen: daytime temperatures that, adjusted for humidity, exceeded 125 degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime temperatures that did not fall below 90. In four days, 583 people died of heat exhaustion and related causes. It was by far Chicago's greatest mass disaster, and one for which the city was utterly unprepared.
In the summer of 1995, Chicagoans endured weather of extremes they had never seen: daytime temperatures that, adjusted for humidity, exceeded 125 degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime temperatures that did not fall below 90. In four days, 583 people died of heat exhaustion and related causes. It was by far Chicago's greatest mass disaster, and one for which the city was utterly unprepared.
William Stevens, a science reporter for The New York Times, opens his vivid--and sometimes frightening--book The Change in the Weather with a look at the Chicago disaster, moving on to consider it and other calamities in the context of millions of years of climatic change. In the last several decades, violent storms, long considered to be aberrations of nature, have come to seem almost the norm. The jury is still out, but much evidence suggests that the so-called greenhouse effect is fueling these ever-more-powerful storms. With global warming come hotter average temperatures; hotter temperatures mean increased water vapor, the stuff from which storms are made; more storms mean more flooding; more flooding means more soil erosion and the destruction of the world's estuaries and coastlines; and so on. Stevens carefully describes some of the scientific debates on global warming and ever-nastier weather, and on what, if anything, might be done to reverse or slow these apparent trends.
Lacing his narrative with interviews with leading climatologists, Stevens offers an engrossing scientific detective story--one that threatens to become a horror story in the very near future. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
Over the past decade, a scientific consensus has emerged that global warming is real and is largely the consequence of human activity--specifically, the burning of fossil fuels for energy, transportation and industrial activity. As such, global warming may be the most important political issue and technological challenge of the next two centuries--or so intimates New York Times science reporter Stevens (Miracle Under the Oaks) in this balanced, authoritative and accessible volume. Stevens makes clear, however, that quantifying the impact of global warming will be difficult, which makes developing and implementing necessary international solutions--already challenging because of the conflicting interests of different countries--an intractable problem. The author skillfully describes the complex science of climate: the ever-changing patterns of global flows of air, water and energy. The world already faces extremes of temperature and precipitation. Yet the floods, droughts, heat waves, blizzards and other exceptional weather of the past decade may be just the beginning. Stevens predicts that rising sea levels caused by melting polar ice caps, coupled with increasingly intense storm surges, may threaten coastal cities and island nations around the world. Agricultural patterns and regional ecology may change dramatically. Prevailing winds, weather cycles and ocean currents may shift. Humanity, that most adaptable of species, will be challenged to keep up. Mainstream and contrarian scientists may make different predictions and propose different policies, but few would dispute Stevens's ominous closing sentence: "The experiment is running, and time will tell." (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|
