Best of
Climate-Change
2000
Earth's Climate: Past and Future
William F. Ruddiman - 2000
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.
Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions
Peter D. Ward - 2000
Today the rich diversity of life on the Earth is again in grave danger--and the cause is not a sudden cataclysmic event but rather humankind's devastation of the environment. Is life on our planet teetering on the brink of another mass extinction? In this absorbing new book, acclaimed paleontologist Peter D. Ward answers this daunting question with a resounding yes.Elaborating on and updating Ward's previous work, The End of Evolution, Rivers in Time delves into his newest discoveries. The book presents the gripping tale of the author's investigations into the history of life and death on Earth through a series of expeditions that have brought him ever closer to the truth about mass extinctions, past and future. First describing the three previous mass extinctions--those marking the transition from the Permian to the Triassic periods 245 million years ago, the Triassic to the Jurassic 200 million years ago, and the Cretaceous to the Tertiary 65 million years ago--Ward assesses the present devastation in which countless species are coming to the end of their evolution at the hand of that wandering, potentially destructive force called Homo sapiens.The book takes readers to the Philippine Sea, now eerily empty of life, where only a few decades of catching fish by using dynamite have resulted in eviscerated coral reefs--and a dramatic reduction in the marine life the region can support. Ward travels to Canada's Queen Charlotte Islands to investigate the extinctions that mark the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods. He ventures also into the Karoo desert of southern Africa, where some of Earth's earliest land life emerged from the water and stood poised to develop into mammal form, only to be obliterated during the Permian/Triassic extinction.Rivers of Time provides reason to marvel and mourn, to fear and hope, as it bears stark witness to the urgency of the Earth's present predicament: Ward offers powerful proof that if radical measures are not taken to protect the biodiversity of this planet, much of life as we know it may not survive.
Cutting Corporate Welfare
Ralph Nader - 2000
Cutting Corporate Welfare details numerous appalling examples of corporate welfare, including: the giveaway of the public airwaves, which by definition belong to the people, to private radio and television stations (including the latest $70 billion gift of the digital spectrum); taxpayer subsidies for giant defense corporation mergers and commercial weapons exports to governments overseas; and the practice of making patients pay twice for drugs—first, as taxpayers subsidize the drugs’ development, and again, as patients, after the federal government gives monopolistic control over the chemical’s manufacture to a price-gouging drug company. Cutting Corporate Welfare sounds a wake-up call for those concerned about how we are being pick-pocketed by big business, and what we can do to stop it.
The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future
Richard B. Alley - 2000
In the 1990s he and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. Here Alley offers the first popular account of the wildly fluctuating climate that characterized most of prehistory--long deep freezes alternating briefly with mild conditions--and explains that we humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate. But, he warns, our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years."The Two-Mile Time Machine" begins with the story behind the extensive research in Greenland in the early 1990s, when scientists were beginning to discover ancient ice as an archive of critical information about the climate. Drilling down two miles into the ice, they found atmospheric chemicals and dust that enabled them to construct a record of such phenomena as wind patterns and precipitation over the past 110,000 years. The record suggests that "switches" as well as "dials" control the earth's climate, affecting, for example, hot ocean currents that today enable roses to grow in Europe farther north than polar bears grow in Canada. Throughout most of history, these currents switched on and off repeatedly (due partly to collapsing ice sheets), throwing much of the world from hot to icy and back again in as little as a few years.Alley explains the discovery process in terms the general reader can understand, while laying out the issues that require further study: What are the mechanisms that turn these dials and flip these switches? Is the earth due for another drastic change, one that will reconfigure coastlines or send certain regions into severe drought? Will global warming combine with natural variations in Earth's orbit to flip the North Atlantic switch again? Predicting the long-term climate is one of the greatest challenges facing scientists in the twenty-first century, and Alley tells us what we need to know in order to understand and perhaps overcome climate changes in the future.
Chemtrails Confirmed
William Thomas - 2000
Marines, Air Traffic Controllers and Tanker Crews are reporting. This book will reveal the scientist who are working n the project, Congressman who oversaw "America's exotic weapons" project and the details so you can understand the Chemtrail project