Fixing Climate
The story of climate science - and how to stop global warming
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- 4,99 €
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- 4,99 €
Publisher Description
With Broeker as his guide, award-winning science writer Robert Kunzig looks back at Earth's volatile climate history so as to shed light on the challenges ahead. Ice ages, planetary orbits, a giant 'conveyor belt' in the ocean ... it's a riveting story full of maverick thinkers, extraordinary discoveries and an urgent blueprint for action.
Likening climate to a slumbering beast, ready to react to the smallest of prods, Broecker shows how assiduously we've been prodding it, by pumping 70 million tonnes of CO2 into the air each year. Fixing Climate explains why we need not just to reduce emissions but to start removing our carbon waste from our atmosphere. And in a thrilling last section of the book, we learn how this could become reality, using 'artificial trees' and underground storage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite efforts at producing clean energy, mankind is going to continue burning coal and oil, say environmental sciences professor Broecker and science writer Kunzig. The pair offers a history of the scientific enquiry that solidified global warming theory, tracing the story from the 19th century through the 1957 "dawn of the modern era of greenhouse studies" when Americans Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss determined that the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing and predicted the world's climate would be affected. Reducing emissions that cause global warming is commendable, the authors contend, but is too little too late. Their solution? Bury the stuff: extract CO2 from the atmosphere then pack it into deep ocean aquifers or within layers of volcanic basalt. They envisage 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, these efforts will also stop the acceleration of global warming. Prototypes have already been constructed, but even the authors admit that "trying to see that far into the future is crazy."
