With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

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It is more evidence, says deMenocal, that climate switches may lurk in the tropics at least as much as at the poles. Richard Alley again reaches for common ground. Perhaps, he says, the Arctic feedbacks were at their height during and immediately after the ice ages, but lost their influence once most of the ice had gone. During the height of the Holocene, at least, perhaps the tropics ruled. But if so, what is driving the feedbacks in the tropics? Where are the tropical equivalents of Broecker's conveyor, Alley's "sink or freeze" switch, and Juergen Mienert's clathrate gun?
A CHUNK OF CORAL Probing the hidden life of El Nino Some researchers have a way of combining business with pleasure. Not for Dan Schrag, the Harvard geochemist, the arduous journeys into thin, cold air on tropical glaciers. Back in 1997, he was on his fourth trip to the paradise islands of the East Indies in search of ancient coral. One day, he was sauntering along a beach on Bunaken Island, a speck of old atoll off the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. "We had had a glorious dive, during which we saw a huge school of barracuda," he remembers. "We stopped for lunch, and I took a walk down the beach, behind the mangrove swamp. It was the last day of the trip. We had failed to find anything useful, and I was preparing to go home. Then I saw this massive coral head on the beach, incredibly well preserved." He chiseled out a piece and headed for the plane. Back in the lab at Harvard, Schrag discovered that this fossilized piece of coral was 125,000 years old and contained sixty-five years' worth of growth rings that gave a brief window on the climate of the western Pacific back before the last ice age. It was a "fantastic discovery," he says. "I guess I got really, really lucky." The coral he had found was the first piece ever located that was large enough and well enough preserved to give a good snapshot of ancient El Ninos. What's more, says Schrag, it came from a region that is in the "bull's-eye" of El Nino, in the heart of Indonesia. His preprandial
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WITH SPEED AND VIOLENCE
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We are on the precipice of climate
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CHRONOLOGY OF CLIMATE CHANGE 5 bill
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1970s Beginning of strong global wa
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James Croll, a nineteenth-century S
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PREFACE: THE CHIMNEY The Greenland
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But even as he gazed on these dynam
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INTRODUCTION Some environmental sto
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Type II climate change became, in t
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eally dire times ahead. Having a da
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with his wife gone, he had few dist
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more than 80 percent for dark ocean
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climates, especially as regards the
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y nature. By the late 1960s he had
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TURNING UP THE HEAT A skeptic's gui
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These findings alone should be enou
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1970s readings at night should be r
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ecause they can happen by chance; b
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The current climate models concur w
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early 2005: "By ignoring these outl
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whole communities. A thousand peopl
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drought regions and droughts to nor
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The big new discovery is that plane
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Similar switchback temperature chan
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fulfill the expectations of climate
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THE WATCHTOWER Keeping climate vigi
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etreated about 3 miles back up the
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for meat, but will sink their teeth
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and birds. But the very highest con
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on summer vacation from chairing an
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There is another driver for the mel
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ON THE SLIPPERY SLOPE Greenland is
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For many centuries these great ice
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lasted for a decade or more now," h
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esults of a detailed satellite rada
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things go wrong, it could just be d
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The demise of the Larsen B ice shel
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slab of ice the size of Spain at th
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At a time when everyone else saw An
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glaciers were responding to a rapid
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The East Antarctic ice sheet is the
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RISING TIDES Saying "toodle-oo" to
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a lagoon, with the open ocean on th
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How could such a thing have happene
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III. RIDING THE CARBON CYCLE IN THE
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some extent, adapted to drought. Bu
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ains returned. The forest may recov
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process ultimately drives winter st
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vegetation that had fallen into the
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Every year, farmers continue burnin
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annual emissions from power plants,
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escaped from western European fores
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many anticipated. And many believe
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Perhaps understandably, such studie
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The entire western Siberian peat bo
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freezing over in winter. And Euan N
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character: it has passed to the pla
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movements of the tree line; examini
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There is nothing unusual about Stor
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along the melting-point isotherm is
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carbon dioxide seems to seesaw betw
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"Corals could be rare on the tropic
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THE WINDS OF CHANGE Tsunamis, megaf
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ut even so, they could not have del
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cattle—and primates. And among th
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Meanwhile, pockmarks are turning up
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een enough, he said, to melt clathr
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The prognosis, Mienert says, is wor
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also releases more energy, so event
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absorbed. But that is just an avera
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darker landscape will be more than
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the temperature range. It showed a
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absence—are most pronounced in de
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Murphy took a standard climate mode
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We can see evidence of this already
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more sober colleagues registered ag
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though, have some scattering effect
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A BILLION FIRES How brown haze coul
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now refuse to discuss the subject w
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importance for a country entirely d
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amounts of heat into the upper atmo
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called oxidation. To take one examp
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ecause the smog itself prevents ult
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ICE AGES AND SOLAR PULSES: GOLDILOC
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enough to freeze the carbon dioxide
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system called Gaia. It may also exp
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in ice sheets forming in the Northe
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enormous hippopotami and gigantic c
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Astronomical forces, he discovered,
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In fact it turned out that Croll wa
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exactly what limited it. Why, after
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There may have been other feedbacks
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gradually raising temperatures. The
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collaborator Gerard Bond, a man a d
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had done the same thing around Anta
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feature in keeping the region warm,
Page 193 and 194: But all this is models. What eviden
Page 195 and 196: modelers feared. But there did seem
Page 197 and 198: Then the unthinkable happened: the
Page 199 and 200: Richard Alley, who was there handli
Page 201 and 202: The vast inrush of cold freshwater
Page 203 and 204: It took about 1,300 years before th
Page 205 and 206: THE PULSE How the sun makes climate
Page 207 and 208: If the Viking settlers had followed
Page 209 and 210: period than it was in the early twe
Page 211 and 212: perplexing that such a widespread e
Page 213 and 214: What climatic events would send vas
Page 215 and 216: event, followed by five less and le
Page 217 and 218: Bond came up trumps again. The evid
Page 219 and 220: TROPICAL HEAT THE FALL The end of A
Page 221 and 222: filled mostly by leaking wadis in t
Page 223 and 224: sun sufficient to reduce temperatur
Page 225 and 226: idea, with plenty of adherents. Rei
Page 227 and 228: Dust Bowl years. In 2002, it fell t
Page 229 and 230: some places. But the rain-bearing w
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Page 233 and 234: TROPICAL HIGH Why an ice man is rew
Page 235 and 236: horseback onto the high slopes of t
Page 237 and 238: ago and then moved north, becoming
Page 239 and 240: in ice in Alaska. It is already pro
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Page 243: monsoon region of the Himalayas, to
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Page 249 and 250: Through isotopic analysis, Schrag e
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Page 253 and 254: how they possibly worked it out." P
Page 255 and 256: famine has fallen. There are many r
Page 257 and 258: snow on the Tibetan plateau in spri
Page 259 and 260: AT THE MILLENNIUM: THE HEAT WAVE Th
Page 261 and 262: temperatures and the start of the h
Page 263 and 264: THE HOCKEY STICK Why now really is
Page 265 and 266: dismissing Inhofe as "the single la
Page 267 and 268: twentieth-century levels, and this
Page 270 and 271: HURRICANE SEASON Raising the storm
Page 272 and 273: account an increasing coastal popul
Page 274 and 275: analysis, Gray argues, the hurrican
Page 276 and 277: that "the contention that hurricane
Page 278 and 279: But even if we don't yet see "super
Page 280 and 281: OZONE HOLES IN THE GREENHOUSE Why m
Page 282 and 283: Cambridge in 1984 to finish his pap
Page 284 and 285: atmosphere is not quite so stable a
Page 286 and 287: INEVITABLE SURPRISES: THE DANCE The
Page 288 and 289: But that doesn't mean that the Arct
Page 290 and 291: Manchester United wouldn't be playi
Page 292 and 293: NEW HORIZONS Feedbacks from the str
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The idea that the South may lead in
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Like El Nino, the Arctic Oscillatio
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has seen air temperatures rise by 5
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The stratosphere and its influence
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CONCLUSION: ANOTHER PLANET Over the
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ocean floor. Until it stops. Who kn
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In the past, if we got things wrong
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consensus, especially in Europe, th
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the air will flatten out. Reaching
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view. "It makes a lot of sense to t
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While the U.S. and Australia emit a
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improving energy efficiency in buil
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emissions from the projected 15.4 b
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economist William Nordhaus suggests
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climate change that this book has c
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Carbon cycle The natural exchange o
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Little ice age The period from the
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Where to start? In
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superseded during 2007 by the Fourt
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12. WILD FIRES OF B ORNEO I visited
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22. THE BIG FREEZE The best read on
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34. H URRICANE SEASON I spoke to Co
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With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

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