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

Citation

(2009), "The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 18 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2009.07318cae.013

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

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

Article Type: Book reviews From: Disaster Prevention and Management, Volume 18, Issue 3

David Archer,Princeton University Press,Princeton, NJ,www.press.princeton.edu2008,180 pp.,ISBN 978-0-691-13654-7,$22.95 (hard cover)

If you have time in your busy schedule to read only one book on climate change and climate science basics, this would be a good choice. Archer, an oceanographer and University of Chicago geosciences professor, has written a conversational, engaging, and short (remember, you are busy) book that covers the last 500 million years or so of the Earth’s climate. He explains how these changes are (and are not) relevant to the understanding of the modern climate crisis. Climate researchers must spend a lot of their time being cold, because ice in its many manifestations – melting, accruing, sliding, glaciers, floating ice shelves, calving icebergs, or simply lying there – plays an important role in the dynamics of climate and in our understanding of it. The clearest pictures of past climate come from ice cores taken from the Greenland ice sheet. The slow accumulation and sometimes rapid melting of ice sheets have provided an engine of past climate warming and cooling, along with many other “forcings”, as the climatologists say.

There is little doubt that accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a critical driver of climate. “The similarity between CO2 and the temperature in Antarctica is jaw-dropping”, Archer writes. “Nature simply doesn’t work so cleanly most of the time. I get the impression from reading the newspaper that the tiniest correlations in shotgun-blasts of medical data are enough to change the diets of millions of concerned people. Are eggs good for you or bad for you this year? … Even the link between cigarette smoking and cancer, kind of a gold standard in the medical world, is not as tight as the correlation between CO2 and Antarctic temperatures.”

One impression you get from reading Archer’s book, and many others that take the long view on climate, is that over the past 10,000 years or so, the earth’s climate has been warmer and more stable than in most of the last 80,000 years. Temperatures have been constrained within a relatively narrow band. This is the period in which humanity has developed to our present condition. The next question is how well we will do as temperatures rise higher than the warm upper bound of the band – as Archer says it will almost certainly do, given the dynamics of ocean, atmosphere, and, of course, ice. We know our species does well under current conditions. How well will we adapt to the coming environment?

“Humankind has the potential to alter the climate of the Earth for hundreds of thousands of years into the future”, Archer writes. “That, I feel, can be said fairly confidently. But will we? … This is much harder to predict. Technologically, I believe that it is possible to avoid dangerous climate change, if we so choose. But making a decision: there’s the tricky part.”