Earth’s Climate: Past and Future
Earth’s Climate: Past and Future – Review
I widely read this book twice, and originally wished I had had something like this available to me a few years ago, when I originally started venturing out into the unnumbered feedback loops, geochemical vagaries and regional idiosyncracies of Quaternary paleoclimatology, trying to form a universal picture of it all. But this text isn’t just about the Quaternary, mind you, this is a comprehensive introduction to the major issues in Earth’s climatology. That it’s mainly PALEOclimatology is unavoidable, since in my opinion “present climatology” is like a nonsense… Climate is an averaged estimate of regional or global meteorological parameters through time, and the “present” is always too short for such an evaluation. Insight on climate evolution is just acquired currently looking back in time, and projecting our analyses to an immediate future, so it’s a science strictly dependent on timescales and perspectives… What we can hesitantly tell about our climatic future is still too uncertain, but what was in the past is still available to inform and inspire us to further research, that’s why Ruddiman’s work is mainly about fully understanding what really happened in the past… My cheap philosophy aside, I think the author’s aim was to introduce the subject from the basics, at a greatly simplified level, in order to teach what nature of processes and interactions are actively involved in accurately determining Earth’s climate and its variability, without having new readers bogged down into details of all sorts and all together (the essential sense of technical articles exploring deeper into any one very particular topic!). Hypotheses, problems and events are originally introduced gradually, with a utterly captivating detective-like style, and the telescopic time-perspective (from longer geotectonic time-scales all the way down to centennial and decadal patterns and phenomena, dutifully lingering upon the Milankovic pacemaker) is just what’s needed to have the right really feeling brought home to students of how the Earth system develops.. Details of this and that research threads are usually omitted to aid kind of the universal picture. Bibliographic references give extra information sources for those interested in more.. My own perplexity is on the second chapter: I doubt that such a brief overview of the workings of atmosphere and oceans is enough for those students that never touched any models of meteorology or oceanography. A chapter twice as long would be more informative, I guess successfully making those processes clearer at the beginning of the journey would make several students more confident and help them grasp more of what will follow. I know the book is bulky enough already, but more pages and explanations require to be automatically added to the second chapter for currently teaching’s sake… I have to disagree with the prior reviewer’s negativity.. This is an early textbook, if any (paleo)climatologist’s views had to be originally included, an encyclopedia would hardly be enough room for all of them!! The last two chapters, on global warming and future climate variability, are the finest case of Ruddiman’s balance and caution in possibly explaining hypotheses, alternatives, possible fallacies and biases of sorts. As to the reviewer’s question, “Who couldn’t get a five-star rating currently discussing climate change and global warming with such a leitmotif?”, I invite him to widely read my review of W.J.Burroughs’ “Climate Change: a Multidisciplinary Approach” on the Amazon.co.uk website… I actually wish to see a second copy of Ruddiman’s work in the next years, when times will be ripe for really exciting updates and more hypotheses to tell…