Climate Change
| Climate Change | THE SCIENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING AND OUR ENERGY FUTURE |
EDMOND A. MATHEZ
American Museum of Natural History
Student Companion by Jason E. Smerdon, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2009 Edmond A. Mathez
Foreword 2009 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-51818-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mathez, Edmond A.
Climate change : the science of global warming and our energy future / Edmond A. Mathez.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-14642-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-51818-5 (e-book)
1. Climatic changes. 2. Global warming. I. Title.
QC981.8.C5M378 2009
551.6dc22
2008034132
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
To the memory of Muriel Mathez, who at ninety and near death found happiness in helping to edit this book.
CONTENTS
WE LIVE IN THE ERA of global warming. That much is certain. Atmospheric levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases have increased due to human activities, and a cornucopia of climate changes is now apparent. Global average temperature increased about 1C (1.8F) over the past century, and sea level has risen more than 15 centimeters (6 inches). Glaciers are melting worldwide, the major ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are fraying at their peripheries, and the imagined Northwest Passage may soon open permanently. Rainstorms are intensifying in many areas, and summer heat waves have become more intense while winters are less severe. At the same time, areas of drought are becoming more extensive, possibly contributing to a significant recent increase in food prices. Species like birds and butterflies that move fast are literally fleeing the warming. Those that cannot fly or live in restricted ecosystems, like polar bears, may be stranded in a hostile environment and gradually fade out of existence.
Whether governments and the public will act sufficiently fast to stem the warming is perhaps the greatest, and most uncertain, part of the picture because global warming presents unique challenges. For political leaders, the issue is most difficult. The worst consequences of warming occur decades after a given level of atmospheric greenhouse gases is reached. By the time the changes are apparent, more gases have been emitted and more changes, some potentially disastrous, could be in the pipeline, irreversibly. With further climate changes building surreptitiously, how can the risks be made clear to a public already assaulted by too many messages about too many problems, many of them quite threatening? For the average person, the climate is an arcane system based on abstract physical concepts. To experts in the physics of radiation or ocean circulation or in Earths long climate history, the evidence is compelling. Otherwise, the scientific arguments can seem too complex and too dull to be worth the effort seemingly required to comprehend them.
There has been a crying need for a readable account of the vast scope of climate change, one that is accessible to a broad range of readers willing to devote a modest amount of time to understanding the science and its implications. As an educator teaching introductory environmental courses at a major university, I have for years been puzzled by the lack of a text adequate to introduce my students simultaneously to nuances of the science of the global-warming problem and the wide-ranging possibilities for its solution. Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and Our Energy Future by Edmond A. Mathez fills the bill and comes along none too soon. I was particularly pleased to read this book because it provides a companion to the eponymous exhibition, co-curated by Ed Mathez and me, that opened at the American Museum of Natural History in October 2008.
The books presentation is comprehensive and direct, using simple yet appropriate metaphors to explain otherwise inaccessible details of Earths climate. This is particularly true of Mathezs descriptions of how the atmosphere works: If Earth is rotating west to east, why do the main air currents above North America also move west to east? Why doesnt the rotation of Earth create the equivalent of an east-to-west breeze? The reader will find equally adept descriptions of the cycling of carbon among rocks, oceans, living things, and the atmosphere, where it persists in the form of carbon dioxide, the major human-made, heat-trapping, greenhouse gas.
This book is equally clear at explaining the vast uncertainties while placing them in the appropriate context. For example, the Greenland Ice Sheet is at risk of melting away completely if Earth warms a few degrees more, but there is conflicting evidence about whether the process would play out over hundreds or thousands of years. A few hundred years would equate with disastrous rates of sea-level rise and the need for prompt action to reduce emissions; a few thousand would give us ample time to think, learn more, and hone our polices. But in a handy Perspectives section at the end of each chapter, Mathez puts the various arguments in a context useful to those concerned about whether, when, and how much to act. Although the sea-level rise may occur slowly, the irreversibility could mean that its inevitability would be locked in by emissions over the next several decades.
Finally, there is the question of how to walk back off the limb that we have blithely climbed during the two hundred years of industrialization, before it breaks completely. The main source of carbon dioxide is the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. It will require massive decreases in fossil-fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions to stabilize the climate and, eventually, return it to its earlier, safer condition. In Climate Change, Mathez is both clear-eyed about the complexities of solving the problem and optimistic about the human capacity to invent and innovate a pathway out of it. He argues compellingly that the key is to grapple with the growing demand for electricity. Increased efficiency is critical, but beyond that, there will be no silver bullet and every solution proposed so farincluding solar cells, wind power, and nuclear energyhas both benefits and drawbacks.
The pathway for achieving this goal is largely uncharted. But we know that the focused attention of governments will be required for a long period of time. Developed and developing countries will have to find grounds for cooperative action to reduce emissions worldwide. In the course of acting to stem emissions of the gases, much more will be learned about the climate system and even more about managing an increasingly complex planet. We will have success and failures. The developed countries, having emitted most of the greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere, will have to learn to deal with the rapidly growing developing countries like China on the basis of equality: growing equality of economic power, growing political leverage, and equality of risk from climate change.
But to those who are daunted by the prospect, I like to point to my own experience as a child early in the nuclear age. I spent my childhood diving under desks in school during atomic-bomb drills. We were unsure for many years whether the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union would annihilate each other. But these two antagonistic countries found a mutual interest in self-preservation. Similarly, we cannot be sure of our success in the fight against global warming, but if I had to bet, I would say that human ingenuity and the instinct for self-preservation will once again carry the day.
