The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change

The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change

by E. Kirsten Peters
The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change

The Whole Story of Climate: What Science Reveals About the Nature of Endless Change

by E. Kirsten Peters

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Overview

In the publicity surrounding global warming, climate scientists are usually the experts consulted by the media. We rarely hear from geologists, who for almost two hundred years have been studying the history of Earth's dramatic and repeated climate revolutions, as revealed in the evidence of rocks and landscapes. This book, written by a geologist, describes the important contributions that geology has made to our understanding of climate change. What emerges is a much more complex and nuanced picture than is usually presented. While the average person often gets the impression that the Earth's climate would be essentially stable if it weren't for the deleterious effects of greenhouse gases, in fact the history of the earth over many millennia reveals a constantly changing climate. As the author explains, several long cold eras have been punctuated by shorter warm periods. The most recent of these warm spells, the one in which we are now living, started ten thousand years ago; based on previous patterns, we should be about due for the return of another frigid epoch. Some scientists even think that the warming of the planet caused by man-made greenhouse gasses tied to agriculture in the past few thousand years may have held off the next ice age. Though this may be possible, much remains uncertain.But what is clearly known is that major climate shifts can be appallingly rapid--occurring over as little as twenty or thirty years. One danger of dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is that they may increase the chance that this "climate switch" will be thrown, with catastrophic effects on worldwide agriculture. Besides her discussion of climate, the author includes chapters on how early naturalists pieced together the complicated geological history of Earth, and she teaches the reader how to interpret the evidence of rock formations and landscape patterns all around us.Accessible and engagingly written, this book is essential reading for anyone looking to understand one of our most important contemporary debates.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781616146733
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Publication date: 11/20/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 290
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

E. Kirsten Peters, PhD (Pullman, WA), is the author of three previous books on geology, most recently Planet Rock Doc. As the "Rock Doc," Dr. Peters publishes syndicated essays on science for newspapers across the nation and she reads some of her pieces on Northwest Public Radio. She taught geology and interdisciplinary science classes at Washington State University for ten years and is currently the director of major grant development for the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter 1 - Facing Our Climate Adversary Squarely

Geologic evidence plainly teaches that Earth’s climate has changed through staggering extremes of balmy warmth to bitter cold. And that’s not just a description of ancient history, when dinosaurs roamed the world. Instead, it’s the clear record of climate change during recent times, when fully modern Homo sapiens left Africa, spread around the world, and ultimately founded our varied cultures and civilizations. 

What’s even more alarming than the recent dates and staggering scale of climate upheavals is how quickly they have swept over the Earth. Many of these have not been gradual events, unfolding over dozens of centuries or millennia. Indeed, as we now know, most major climate changes in geologically recent times have occurred in a mere twenty or thirty years. In other words, in the span of a single human lifetime, Earth’s climate has crashed from warm times much like the present to Ice Age conditions — or rocketed back again to warmth. In between these catastrophic changes there have been numerous smaller, but still substantial, climate shifts. Even these lesser events have been more than sufficient to quickly alter entire ecosystems, and most of them have been devastatingly fast. 

The more scientists learn about the natural climate revolutions woven into the fabric of the planet, the greater our awe about how supremely fickle is climate on Earth. And climate upheavals have rearranged more than just entire temperature charts. Wind, precipitation, and other elements of weather have been as varied as temperature change. For example, what is now the driest part of the Sahara Desert was only four thousand years ago a lush and verdant landscape with lakes, fish, crocodiles, turtles, and people. But when climate turned yet another corner in Earth’s long history, the rains shifted far to the south and the green splendor vanished, along with the people. Today, in the same spot, there is nothing but sand.  

No full climate crash has occurred in the span of written history. That may be chance, or it may be that if there had been a fully global and rapid climate revolution, early civilizations would not have survived, so we would not be here. But, in any event, the simple fact that we don’t have written records of natural and extreme global climate revolutions accounts for a large measure of the ignorance of even the educated public about the behavior of climate on Earth. But geologists can read the physical record of the enormous changes that swept over the globe before civilization was established and our written history commenced. The signs are plain once you learn to see them: Earth’s global climate reverses, staggers, and stumbles, again and again, sometimes with changes that occur within the span of a single human life. What’s worse, the Earth looks like she may be overdue for another, fully natural, climate revolution, as well as for more moderate and ongoing climate shifts. 

The public has heard a great deal in recent years from the ranks of climate science, a discipline that’s partially distinct from geology. There’s much to be valued in the complex computer models that climate scientists use. But climate science is quite a recent branch of research, and climate scientists are not the only ones with professional opinions about the Earth. For almost two hundred years geologists have studied the basic evidence of how climate has changed on our planet. We don’t generally traffic in computer models so much as direct physical evidence left in the muck and rocks of our planet. From those kinds of grubby facts, which this book will explain at a level any interested citizen can follow, we know a great deal about how climate has actually changed. As geologists, we also have evidence from many millennia and even millions of years under our belts, from periods of complete cycles of bitter cold to balmy warmth and back again to deep-freeze conditions. 

Regardless of American energy policies and our greenhouse gas emissions, changes in climate — including both massive and moderate upheavals in temperature and precipitation — are going to be a part of Earth’s future, just as they have been the bedrock of the past. That’s why the public and American policymakers need to understand what geologists know of past climate changes. Failing to discuss the evidence of both massive and moderate natural climate change is like speeding downhill on a bicycle at fifty miles per hour while wearing a blindfold. We can, if we wish, spend the next minute tightening the strap on our helmet. But ripping off the blindfold seems a wiser first step toward giving us a chance of survival. And the only way to start to see around us clearly is to look at the record of what climate has done in Earth’s past. Some of the facts we can draw out from the Earth’s records are encouraging, while many are quite challenging. But it’s surely better to be informed about how climate on Earth behaves than to willfully wear a blindfold at this critical crossroads of our history.

Please understand, geologists are not Luddites who say we should have no concern about our production of greenhouse gases, nor do we argue that what you’ve heard in the popular press about global warming is hogwash. But some of us believe you’ve been told only one isolated part of a much longer and richer climate story. To understand what might come next for climate — no matter our carbon policies or lack thereof — you need to understand what geologists know about Earth’s past climates.

Here’s a simple analogy: if you were facing a crippling medical condition, you might be well advised to seek the opinion of differently trained medical professionals — perhaps surgeons, internists, and pharmacists. In the same way, you are well advised to listen to what geologists — as well as climate and environmental scientists — have to say about Earth’s recent temperature and precipitation changes. The framework of geological knowledge is different than that of many climate and environmental scientists, and the advice we offer may differ from that of our colleagues in these younger disciplines. It’s not that any one group has a monopoly on everything that’s valuable, any more than cardiologists are always right and internists are always useless. Rather, before you make decisions about a route to follow, it’s to your advantage to be informed about the lay of the land around you. 

At the end of the day, many geologists feel strongly that the best guide we have to the future is the evidence of the past. The Earth’s past is the part of the picture that’s most clear, providing the data that are least in dispute. The past is also the realm in which geologists excel; it’s the part of the puzzle to which we’ve been devoted for many generations. 

As it happens, many geologic principles can be quickly learned by amateurs. In just a few pages, this book will show you how geologists can literally see Earth’s recent climates when we look out the window. You, too, can master this skill set, and you’ll be able to understand the basic outline of climate, as Nature herself can show it to you around your house or during your summer vacation in the Rockies, New England, or around the Great Lakes. And I’ll teach you what you need to know not through a list of facts, but by explaining the story of how geologists learned the basic principles that guide our science. In other words, this isn’t a textbook, but a narrative, the story of what real-life geologists — complete with human limitations and foibles — learned as they examined the parts of the natural world influenced by climate change. It’s an interesting detective story in its own right, but it will also give you the basic tools to see the climate evidence that, indeed, lies all around you. 

Here’s a warning: you may have to unlearn a couple of things you think you know. For example, many educated Americans live with the assumption that Earth’s climate is quite static under natural conditions. The weather of our childhood, after all, felt like it was right and proper, the way the Earth was meant to be — and remain. But thinking of climate as a constant is grossly misguided. The weather of our childhood, in fact, was different from the weather endured by the passengers on the Mayflower and also different from that in which Viking raiders harassed the people of Europe a thousand years ago. The weather we knew when we were children — perfect and proper though it seemed — was but a single snapshot of the ceaseless and unfolding process of ongoing climate change. 

The notion that climate should remain the same over time is at the core of much of the recent discussion in the public square. Change — including fully natural climate revolutions and more frequent and moderate climate shifts — is understandably frightening. We naturally shy away from it. That’s why it’s actually comforting to believe the message of extreme environmentalists in recent years. Their argument is that we humans are in the process of destroying the world as we know it through our production of greenhouse gases, that we are the sole cause of current climate change. From that premise it follows that if we slash emissions of carbon dioxide greatly enough, climate will stop changing. That’s actually reassuring compared to the view offered to us by the Earth herself. The fact is, if human beings had remained hunter-gatherers throughout our entire history, never producing a single molecule of greenhouse gases through agriculture or industry, climate today would still be changing. It would be lurching toward higher temperatures, crashing toward vastly colder temperatures, or at least swinging toward something different from what has been. That’s just the nature of Earth’s climate. It’s not to our liking, and it’s not to say we should do nothing about curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, but surely we must look the basic facts of natural change in the face if we are to have useful policy debates in the public square. 

Fortunately, most Americans have another and more useful childhood touchstone for memories when it comes to climate. Many of us recall the gist of books about the Ice Age that we read in grade-school libraries. Those books were decorated with images of saber-toothed tigers, giant ground sloths, and wooly mammoths. Behind a mammoth or two, in the distance, there was likely to be a sketch of a great glacier, perhaps with fissures lacing its edges. The world, it was clear in the books, had once been quite different, in terms of both climate and species. 

Although such library treasures gave us some significant information about climate, it’s also true that there’s much more that’s now known to science than the mere outline of the deep freeze you saw in grade school. In the past twenty years, scientists have found a richly detailed record of climate change in materials as humble as lakebed mud in North America and as pristine as glacial ice in Greenland and Antarctica. That physical record has shown us that major climate crashes are interspersed with the history of milder fluctuations. But “milder” is a comment based on the Earth’s standards, not ours, because even milder changes have led to famines. 

Here’s just one example: a dose of natural climate change once hit the mightiest empire of the Bronze Age, the Egyptian kingdom of the River Nile and its broad delta. Some 4,300 years ago (2300 BCE), Egyptian civilization was flourishing, built on agriculture enriched by organized irrigation, rather than just the scratch-in-the-dirt approach to farming. Egypt’s agriculture had led to population growth, big cities with educated elites, and well-trained and equipped armies. But, quite out of the blue, natural climate change hit the Egyptian empire, and it hit hard. 

It wasn’t that temperatures changed much in North Africa but that precipitation patterns were altered. We have basic written accounts of this “small” change in climate — small by the Earth’s standards. As one written account makes plain, the famine and cultural collapse triggered by this relatively mild climate shift was so great that wealthy families in Egypt ate their own children. Thus, rapid climate change quickly brought the superpower of the day to the point that parents resorted to cannibalism — just so the adults could survive a few more weeks.  
While Egyptians were eating their offspring, climate change was affecting other parts of the Earth, too. In general, the higher latitudes of the planet are likely to experience more temperature changes during dynamic times. It is possible that global temperature changes — and their related precipitation changes in Egypt — were one part of what reshaped ecosystems in and around the arctic of that day. It was around that same point that the last, isolated bands of woolly mammoths disappeared from Wrangel Island, off the Siberian coast. The mammoths, that great symbol of the Ice Age in your childhood, had clung on for several thousand years after the enormous climate upheaval that occurred ten thousand years ago, but they didn’t make it through the blip that hit them in the Bronze Age. 

For animals and for people, Earth’s climate is an adversary the like of which many policymakers and environmentalists have not yet dreamed. Natural climate change is the elephant in the room within our public discussion of climate. In our rush to start thinking about limiting our production of greenhouse gases — a goal we will surely undertake to some degree — we’ve unfortunately left behind the reality of the history of Earth’s climate. Natural climate change is fearsome to contemplate, to be sure. But the time has come to acknowledge the geologic elephant that’s standing so near us. While we cannot tame or control the beast, we owe it to ourselves to recognize the facts of what Earth’s climate is like. Planning for and adapting to climate change is as worthy a goal as limiting greenhouse gases, once we acknowledge how frequent and profound natural climate change is. No matter our political commitments, we can all surely come to better policy judgments about energy and climate by acknowledging the facts regarding how climate behaves. Doing so would certainly be better than prolonging our collective denial of what we are up against.

Table of Contents

1 Facing Our Climate Adversary Squarely 9

2 The Ice Time 23

3 Staggering Complexities And Surprising Side Effects 43

4 From Woolly Mammoths To Saber-Toothed Tigers 67

5 Miraculous Mud 83

6 Wood Reveals Climate Clues 99

7 The Evidence of The Ice 131

8 Even More Frequent Boom-Bust Cycles 149

9 Have Humans Shaped Climate For Millennia? 171

10 From Efforts To Modify Climate To Fears of Global Cooling 193

11 Global Warming Discovered 207

12 Leaving The Garden 239

Epilogue For The Paperback Edition 259

Acknowledgments 265

About The Author 269

Notes 271

References 277

Index 291

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