Fixing Climate is a colorful history of a few of the theories and some of the people that have identified the course of catastrophic climate change. It explores how mankind has arrived at the point where climate change is no longer preventable and will continue if even if sustainable alternatives are adopted.
Fixing Climate Overview
Fixing Climate is a history of the climate crisis that reads like a series of mini scientific biographies based on the authors travels around the world and across the centuries illuminating the lives of those who sought answers to climate mysteries. Using the history of scientific inquiry that solidified global warming theory, it traces the story from the 19th century through the 1957 dawn of the modern era of greenhouse studies. At that time Americans Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss determined that the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing and predicting the world's climate would be effected.
From glacial studies in the early-nineteenth-century Swiss Alps to the work of Serbian Milutin Milankoc, who calculated orbital cycles while in a World War I Austrian prison camp, Fixing Climate highlights the research of dozens of men who followed their own natural curiosity into areas not actively studied by their contemporaries. The personal stories from 200 years ago are as relevant as those from last year.
The authors use the analogy that dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is akin to the sewage problem faced in the nineteenth century. The book is a call to arms for humankind to take responsibility for fossil-fuel dependency.
Fixing Climate Solutions
The authors write that reducing emissions which cause global warming is commendable but it is too little too late. The solution they suggest is to bury the stuff, extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and then pack it into deep ocean aquifers or within layers of volcanic basalt. They envision 80 million small collectors each scrubbing a ton of CO2 daily from the world's atmosphere to balance what is produced by burning coal and oil. In a best-case scenario, they believe that these efforts will stop the acceleration of global warming.
Broecker and Kunzig argue that the current crisis is urgent but not insurmountable, requiring technological development and political leadership. They state that "We need to create the means for taking our carbon back out of the air and putting it underground, where it came from."
About the Authors
Geoscientist Wallace Broecker at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, New York teamed up with journalist Robert Kunzig to write Fixing Climate. Broecker is the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at Columbia. He has published 400 papers and won numerous awards and prizes including the National Medal of Science.
Broecker, Wallace and Robert Kunzig. Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal about Current Threat--and How to Counter it. New York, New York: Hill and Wang, 2009
More helpful articles:
 |
