Deep Future
The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth
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3.2 • 66 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2011 title
A bold, far-reaching look at how our actions will decide the planet's future for millennia to come.
Imagine a planet where North American and Eurasian navies are squaring off over shipping lanes through an acidified, ice-free Arctic. Centuries later, their northern descendants retreat southward as the recovering sea freezes over again. And later still, future nations plan how to avert an approaching Ice Age... by burning what remains of our fossil fuels.
These are just a few of the events that are likely to befall Earth and human civilization in the next 100,000 years. And it will be the choices we make in this century that will affect that future more than those of any previous generation. We are living at the dawn of the Age of Humans; the only question is how long that age will last.
Few of us have yet asked, "What happens after global warming?" Drawing upon the latest, groundbreaking works of a handful of climate visionaries, Curt Stager's Deep Future helps us look beyond 2100 a.d. to the next hundred millennia of life on Earth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stager (Field Notes From the Northern Forest), a climatologist working at the University of Maine's Climate Center, provides a long-range view of climate change which is at odds with the "sky is falling" alarmist view of global warming. While not denying the effect of human activity on global climate, Stager is sharply critical of media hype and spin. As a paleoecologist, he draws on biology, chemistry, and geology including past geological records to situate current trends in the context of long range effects, as shown by the fossil and geological record of planetary evolution. In other words, in the aftermath of the last ice age, "...it took several millennia of melting for global sea level to stabilize near today's elevation..." He suggests that we "have prevented the next ice-age"; once predicted to happen in 50,000 years, he states that our climate activity has added another 70,000 years to that estimate. Although Stager thinks a disaster comparable to the biblical flood is unlikely, he doesn't minimize the potential devastation that could occur from even modest sea level rise or the loss of marine biodiversity. A thoughtful, if controversial, approach to an over-heated subject.
