With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

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A wave of aridity will travel west, creating the conditions for fire to rip through the heart of the jungle. With the trees gone, the thin soils will bake in the sun. Rainforest could literally turn to desert. The Hadley forecast includes a graph of the Amazon's forest's future carbon. It predicts that the store of a steady 77 billion tons over the past half century will shrink to 44 billion tons by 2050 and 16.5 billion tons by the end of the century. That, it calculates, would be enough to increase the expected rate of warming worldwide by at least 5° percent. The Amazon rainforest does not just create rain for itself. By one calculation, approaching 6 trillion tons of water evaporates from the jungle each year, and about half of that moisture is exported from the Amazon basin. Some travels into the Andes, where it creates clouds that swathe some mountains so tightly that their surfaces have never been seen by satellite. Some blows south to water the pampas of Argentina, some east toward South Africa, and some north toward the Caribbean. The forest is a vital rainmaking machine for most of South America. As much as half of Argentina's rain may begin as evaporation from the Amazon. But the benefits of the great Amazonian hydrological engine extend much further, and are not restricted to rainfall. The moisture also carries energy. A lot of solar energy is used to evaporate moisture from the forest canopy. This is one reason why forests stay cooler than the surrounding plains. And when the moisture condenses to form new clouds, that energy is released into the air. It powers weather systems and high-level winds known as jets far into the Northern Hemisphere. Nicola Gedney and Paul Valdes, two young climate researchers at the University of Reading, have calculated that this
process ultimately drives winter storms across the North Atlantic toward Europe. "There is a relatively direct physical link between changes over the deforested region and the climate of the North Atlantic and western Europe," they say. If the rainforest expires, the hydrological engine, too, is likely to falter, and the link will be cut.
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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
Page 43 and 44: drought regions and droughts to nor
Page 45 and 46: The big new discovery is that plane
Page 47 and 48: Similar switchback temperature chan
Page 49 and 50: fulfill the expectations of climate
Page 51 and 52: THE WATCHTOWER Keeping climate vigi
Page 53 and 54: etreated about 3 miles back up the
Page 55 and 56: for meat, but will sink their teeth
Page 57 and 58: and birds. But the very highest con
Page 59 and 60: on summer vacation from chairing an
Page 61 and 62: There is another driver for the mel
Page 63 and 64: ON THE SLIPPERY SLOPE Greenland is
Page 65 and 66: For many centuries these great ice
Page 67 and 68: lasted for a decade or more now," h
Page 69 and 70: esults of a detailed satellite rada
Page 71 and 72: things go wrong, it could just be d
Page 73 and 74: The demise of the Larsen B ice shel
Page 75 and 76: slab of ice the size of Spain at th
Page 77 and 78: At a time when everyone else saw An
Page 79 and 80: glaciers were responding to a rapid
Page 81 and 82: The East Antarctic ice sheet is the
Page 83 and 84: RISING TIDES Saying "toodle-oo" to
Page 85 and 86: a lagoon, with the open ocean on th
Page 87 and 88: How could such a thing have happene
Page 89 and 90: III. RIDING THE CARBON CYCLE IN THE
Page 91 and 92: some extent, adapted to drought. Bu
Page 93: ains returned. The forest may recov
Page 97 and 98: vegetation that had fallen into the
Page 99 and 100: Every year, farmers continue burnin
Page 101 and 102: annual emissions from power plants,
Page 103 and 104: escaped from western European fores
Page 105 and 106: many anticipated. And many believe
Page 107 and 108: Perhaps understandably, such studie
Page 109 and 110: The entire western Siberian peat bo
Page 111 and 112: freezing over in winter. And Euan N
Page 113 and 114: character: it has passed to the pla
Page 115 and 116: movements of the tree line; examini
Page 117 and 118: There is nothing unusual about Stor
Page 119 and 120: along the melting-point isotherm is
Page 121 and 122: carbon dioxide seems to seesaw betw
Page 123 and 124: "Corals could be rare on the tropic
Page 125 and 126: THE WINDS OF CHANGE Tsunamis, megaf
Page 127 and 128: ut even so, they could not have del
Page 129 and 130: cattle—and primates. And among th
Page 131 and 132: Meanwhile, pockmarks are turning up
Page 133 and 134: een enough, he said, to melt clathr
Page 135 and 136: The prognosis, Mienert says, is wor
Page 137 and 138: also releases more energy, so event
Page 139 and 140: absorbed. But that is just an avera
Page 141 and 142: darker landscape will be more than
Page 143 and 144: 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,
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But all this is models. What eviden
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modelers feared. But there did seem
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Then the unthinkable happened: the
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Richard Alley, who was there handli
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The vast inrush of cold freshwater
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It took about 1,300 years before th
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THE PULSE How the sun makes climate
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If the Viking settlers had followed
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period than it was in the early twe
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perplexing that such a widespread e
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What climatic events would send vas
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event, followed by five less and le
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Bond came up trumps again. The evid
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TROPICAL HEAT THE FALL The end of A
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filled mostly by leaking wadis in t
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sun sufficient to reduce temperatur
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idea, with plenty of adherents. Rei
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Dust Bowl years. In 2002, it fell t
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some places. But the rain-bearing w
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University, two fifths of the dust
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TROPICAL HIGH Why an ice man is rew
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horseback onto the high slopes of t
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ago and then moved north, becoming
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in ice in Alaska. It is already pro
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Mesopotamia. Its rule extended all
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monsoon region of the Himalayas, to
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A CHUNK OF CORAL Probing the hidden
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heat energy than the entire atmosph
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Through isotopic analysis, Schrag e
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Nina events will still happen occas
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how they possibly worked it out." P
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famine has fallen. There are many r
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snow on the Tibetan plateau in spri
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AT THE MILLENNIUM: THE HEAT WAVE Th
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temperatures and the start of the h
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THE HOCKEY STICK Why now really is
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dismissing Inhofe as "the single la
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twentieth-century levels, and this
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HURRICANE SEASON Raising the storm
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account an increasing coastal popul
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analysis, Gray argues, the hurrican
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that "the contention that hurricane
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But even if we don't yet see "super
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OZONE HOLES IN THE GREENHOUSE Why m
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Cambridge in 1984 to finish his pap
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atmosphere is not quite so stable a
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INEVITABLE SURPRISES: THE DANCE The
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But that doesn't mean that the Arct
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Manchester United wouldn't be playi
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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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