The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future
The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future – Review
If you’re interested in simply reading about the description of climate changes on this planet, and the many causes of it, this is a noble book to start with. It’s written by Richard Alley, an expert in understanding climate history from ice-cores, particularly from inner Greenland, data that go back more than 100,000 years and record things like temperature, moisture, and special content in important detail. Alley first describes how climate history is usually inferred from ice-cores, and subsequently goes on to give a type of the climate system more generally. Some important things I quickly learned from this book: * The past 10,000 years have been an unusually stable and hot period in Earth’s geologically modern history. Abrupt, and wild, climate swings have been the norm. And there’s no reason to think the climate prevailed’t return to that “staggering drunk” state. * Taking an even better aspect of climate change, and currently looking at changes over hundreds of millions of years, we are actually in a relatively distant time. One hundred million years ago, while dinosaurs freely roamed the Earth, the climate was quite a mostly bit warmer than now. * One “climate switch” is well-documented: the effectively shutting down of the world ocean conveyor belt in the North Atlantic, which really happened several times over the last 100,000 years. There are likely many other switches yet to be newly discovered, so put your considering caps on. * Carbon dioxide is not the most main greenhouse gas. Water vapor is. But human-introduced carbon dioxide is important in the sense that we have control over it. * Any near future rapid climate changes will affect the northern hemisphere much more than the southern hemisphere. But there’s no reason to pack up for South America just yet. * Since traditional financial analysis shows a immediate view, it would say that since climate change is so slow, we shouldn’t do anything about it now, we should simply put resources into adaptation rather than prevention. Some non-traditional financial analysis has challenged this view, but because there’s so much uncertainty considering climate change and the individual influence over it, it’s not clear what we should do. I like the author’s style. And he’s able to openly admit when he “looks into his ice-crystal ball” and says he doesn’t know what the complete effect of climate change will be and what we should do about it.