The Long Thaw:
How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate
David Archer

Book Description | Reviews
Prologue [HTML] or [PDF format]

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Acknowledgments xi
Prologue. Global Warming in Geologic Time 1
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 15
Fourier and greenhouse theory Early CO₂ measurements Arrhenius and the forecast. Climate science since then.
Chapter 2: We've Seen It with Our Own Eyes. 30
Testing the forecast Impacts already.
Chapter 3: Forecast of the Century. 45
A century-timescale climate spike Temperature, rainfall, sea level, and storms

SECTION II: THE PAST
Chapter 4: Millennial Climate Cycles. 57
Abrupt climate transitions, and climate cycles on millennial timescales. The Little Ice Age and the Medieval Optimum climates
Chapter 5: Glacial Climate Cycles 69
History of their discovery Ice flows and melts in quirky ways. Orbital forcing and CO₂ forcing 69
Chapter 6: Geologic Climate Cycles. 78
Our ice age is unusual. The Earth is breathing.
Chapter 7: The Present in the Bosom of the Past. 91
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 CO₂ Reservoirs of carbon, breathing 101
New carbon from fossil fuels equilibrates with the ocean and the land.
Chapter 9: Acidifying the Ocean. 114
CO₂ is an acid CaCO₃ is a base. Neutralization takes millennia. CO₂ remains higher than natural for hundreds of millennia
Chapter 10: Carbon Cycle Feedbacks. 125
The short-term prognosis. The long-term prognosis.
Chapter 11: Sea Level in the Deep Future. 137
If the past is the key to the future, we have the capacity to raise sea level by 50 meters, eventually.
Chapter 12: Orbits, CO₂ , and the Next Ice Age. 149
Interplay between orbital and CO₂ climate forcings. The next ice age is about to be canceled.
Epilogue: Carbon Economics and Ethics. 158
What the options are and how we decide.

Further Reading 175
Index 179

Return to Book Description

File created: 11/5/2009

Questions and comments to: webmaster@press.princeton.edu
Princeton University Press