Synopses & Reviews
Paleoclimatology courses are growing, attracting a wide variety of students in earth and environmental sciences, geography, ecology, and related fields. Earth's Climate: Past and Future works as either a nonmajors introduction to Earth system science or climate change, or as a majors/graduate-level overview of the processes and techniques in climate science. Written from a multidisciplinary perspective by one of the field's preeminent researcher/instructors, the text summarizes the major lessons to be learned from 550 million years of climate changes, as a way of evaluating the climatological impact on and by humans in this century. The book also looks ahead to possible effects during the next several centuries of fossil fuel use.
Table of Contents
I . FRAMEWORK OF CLIMATE SCIENCE 1. Overview of Climate Science
2. Earth's Climate System Today
3. Climatic Archives, Data and Models
II. TECTONIC-SCALE CLIMATE CHANGE
4. CO2 and Long-Term Climate
5. Plate Tectonics and Climate
6. Greenhouse Earth
7. Back into the Icehouse
III. ORBITAL-SCALE CLIMATE CHANGE
8. Astronomical Control of Insolation
9. Insolation Control of Monsoons
10. Insolation Control of Ice Sheets
11. Orbital-Scale Changes in CO2 and Methane
12. Orbital-Scale Interactions in the Climate System
IV. DEGLACIAL AND MILLENNIAL CLIMATE CHANGE
13. The Last Glacial Maximum
14. From the Last Deglaciation to the Present
15. Millennial Climatic Oscillations
V. HISTORICAL AND FUTURE CLIMATE CHANGE
16. Historical Changes in Climate
17. Humans and Climate Change
18. Twentieth-Century Climate: The Greenhouse Debate
19. Climate Change in the Next 100 to 1000 Years