| View Larger Image | With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change | Paperbackby Fred Pearce (Author)
| List Price: | $15.00 | | Price: | $10.20 | | You Save: | $4.80 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Beacon Press | | Page Count: | 304 Pages | | Publication Date: | March 03, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 122,120nd |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780807085776
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- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Fred Pearce has been writing about climate change for twenty years, and the more he learns, the worse things look. As Pearce began researching this book, numerous scientists sought him out to recount their findings and fears: where once they were concerned about gradual climate change, many now worry that we will soon be experiencing abrupt change resulting from triggering tipping points. With Speed and Violence is the most up-to-date and readable book yet about the constantly accumulating evidence for global warming and the dramatic effects it may unleash."[Pearce's] grasp of [scientists'] work is exceptional. What's more, he has a talent for explaining science in terms understandable to the nonscientist . . . This enjoyable read was difficult to put down." —Library Journal, starred review "If you want to quickly get up to date on climate change and its consequences, I recommend With Speed and Violence. If you can read only one book on climate change, this is it." —Lester Brown, president, Earth Policy Institute |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 35 reviews)
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Global Tipping Points by S. Palm (St. Peter, MN USA)  4 Stars
May 15, 2009
This a fascinating book for all no matter how much knowledge one has with the subject of climate change. Climate change is important because it is something that will severely impact our world in devastating ways. Using 18 years of previous knowledge and research, Fred Pearce describes the effects and dangers of this phenomenon. By interviewing numerous researchers and scientists, most of whom are experts, he has proved that global climate change is indeed occurring; it is not just a myth.
Even though I have limited knowledge in this subject, this book was still easy to read and understand. Pearce does a fine job of explaining ideas in "non-science" ways so that all readers can understand his arguments. The information in this book is so extensive and detailed that any reader can turn into an expert on climate change. While he depicts the various problems that humankind will face in the future, he unfortunately does not give any advice on how to solve them. I was disappointed because it is now a known fact that our current generation as well as future generations will face tremendous problems as a result of climate change, some of which are already starting. Pearce interviews so many experts in this book and I would have liked to hear some thoughts on how to solve our current problem. But overall I enjoyed this book and would recommend this book to anyone!
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You Don't Know Climate Change Until You Read This Book by Terry Sunday (El Paso, Texas United States)  5 Stars
April 07, 2009
There's a reason why anthropogenic climate change, or human-caused global warming, has been very much in the news for years. No other field of science makes such sobering predictions of what the world could be like in the near future if humans continue to pollute the earth's atmosphere with greenhouse gases. The idea of global warming is not universally believed, of course. The fact that it is not is a great example of the scientific method at work. Theories must withstand the most rigorous and skeptical scrutiny before they are widely accepted as correct. The science of global warming gets stronger every day, though, and it is instructive to note that most skeptics are employed by oil, gas and chemical companies, and have huge financial stakes in playing down the consequences of the observations of earth's changing climate that even they cannot deny.
Global warming can seem to be a stately, gradual, incremental process that will not have big impacts on life as we know it for centuries. After all, who can get excited about an increase in the earth's average temperature of a couple of degrees? Who cares if sea levels rise a few inches? Would anyone even notice such small changes? If this is what you think, you need to read "With Speed and Violence." Author Fred Pearce presents compelling, well-documented evidence that global warming can profoundly alter the earth's climate on time scales of just a few years, or, in some really scary cases, in the space of a single season. Some of the possibilities he discusses make "The Day After Tomorrow" seem like a documentary.
This is not fringe science or sensationalistic journalism. "With Speed and Violence" reports the latest mainstream research (with references, so you can check out the peer-reviewed papers yourself if you want to) about "tipping points" in the earth's climatic system. These points are certain conditions of temperatures, greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean salinity, atmospheric aerosols, etc., that act like "on-off" switches, and can drastically change the climate very quickly if they are flipped. Here's just one example. In March 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf, a huge chunk of ice as big as Luxembourg and 650 feet thick, broke away from the coast of Antarctica and shattered to pieces. Its dramatic demise was almost certainly caused by air and water temperatures that had been warming gradually for almost 50 years. When Larsen B broke up, it did not itself have any effect on sea levels, because it was already floating (just as ice melting in a glass does not raise the water level). But it acted like a cork in a wine bottle for inland glaciers behind it. Now that Larsen B is not there to hold them back, these glaciers are flowing to the sea eight times faster than when the shelf was in place, and these glaciers DO raise sea levels when they calve icebergs into the water. There is enough ice in these now-released "speeding" glaciers to raise sea levels by nearly 20 feet. Thus can a local event have severe global consequences. A 20-foot sea level rise would flood coastal areas worldwide. Worse, there's no going back from a tipping point. We can't reassemble Larsen B and glue it back onto Antarctica. Once it's gone, it's gone, and everything changes.
"With Speed and Violence" covers scores of these potential "tipping points." Mr. Pearce presents each one in a very balanced manner, clearly not that of a wild-eyed fanatic. They will not all happen, of course, but even if just a few do, human society on earth could change beyond recognition. Drastic climate changes have happened before in the earth's history, and will certainly happen again. But, with our ongoing reckless consumption of fossil fuels, we seem determined to do everything we can to make the next climate cycle as fast, violent and hostile as possible. Can we afford to risk triggering conditions "beyond which there is no redemption," as the nation's top climate modeler warned in 2005? I heartily agree with Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute: "If you can read only one book on climate change, this is it." Most highly recommended. Read it, think about it and then take action before its too late.
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On the Brink of Abrupt Climate Change by Randy A. Stadt (Edmonton, Canada) 5 Stars
January 07, 2009
Fred Pearce, in 37 short chapters, has given us a very readable account of the current issues in the broad subject of global warming. I wish I could say it is a reassuring read, but it is not. From melting glaciers to thawing permafrost, the prognosis is not only not good but also possibly catastrophic.
The primary issue is the sensitivity of global temperatures to continued "outside forcing" brought on by increases in greenhouse gases. Conventional thinking, that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), predicts that rising emissions of carbon dioxide will produce a steady rise in atmospheric concentrations and an equally steady rise in temperatures. Pearce notes, however, that "the history of our planet's climate shows that it does not do gradual change. Under pressure...it lurches - virtually overnight."
For example, about 8,000 years ago ice-age conditions reversed with such speed that about half the warming took place in only a decade. This means that the world warmed by 9 degrees F - the IPCC's prediction for the next century - within ten years. How did this happen? It seems that the rise and fall of the ice ages coincided with a minor wobble in the earth's orbit. Its effect on the solar radiation reaching the planet was minute, and it happened only gradually. But somehow earth's systems amplified its impact, turning a minor warming into a sudden defrost. Pearce argues that the amplification certainly involved greenhouse gases: "the extraordinary way in which temperatures and carbon dioxide levels have moved in lockstep permits no other interpretation". So a minor change in the planet's heating - much less, indeed, than we are currently inflicting through greenhouse gases - could cause such massive worldwide changes.
As recently as 2001, the IPCC suggested that with a warming beyond about 5 degrees F, Greenland might gradually start to melt, and it would be unstoppable because of positive feedback mechanisms that would spur it along. At the time it was thought that the process would take a thousand years or more. But now, with the discovery of increasing amounts of meltwater pouring into cracks in the ice down to the bedrock at its very base, the potential destabilization of the ice sheets may reduce the timescale down from millenia to years and decades.
We have already witnessed this kind of event in the catastrophic shattering of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica in 2002. Because it was floating, its destruction did not raise sea levels. But like removing the cork from a bottle, it has opened the way for land-based ice to drain into the sea, and that does raise sea levels. There is the possibility that the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse and raise sea levels by 6 yards in the next century. The larger East Antarctic ice sheet seems to be much more stable, but certainty is diminishing as more is learned of the mechanisms of destabilization, and we can't say that it is immune. If it went it would raise sea levels by 50 yards or more. And if all the ice melted, at both poles, it would raise sea levels worldwide by 230 feet. Rapid melting has happened in the past. About 14,500 years ago, as the world was undergoing a thaw, suddenly sea levels rose very, very quickly: within 400 years, they rose by 65 feet.
In addition to this, fear is growing about the carbon stored in the thick layers of permafrost in the far north, especially in Siberia. The stores of carbon here are so vast that it could be described as nature's own doomsday device. As the permafrost thaws, it begins to rot, releasing most of its tens of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In those bogs and lakes where there is very little oxygen, most of the carbon will be converted into methane, a greenhouse gas potentially a hundred times more potent than carbon dioxide.
A tipping point seems to be at work here, as the newly melted permafrost, darker than the old frozen surface, absorbs more heat and causes more warming. And as temperatures rise, methane emissions grow exponentially. How much the thawing permafrost will contribute to global warming is unclear. If all the stored carbon were released as carbon dioxide, it would add something like 5 degrees F to average temperatures around the world. But if it was mostly released as methane, depending on how quickly it was released (because it decomposes to carbon dioxide after a decade) it could actually raise temperatures by tens of degrees.
According to Jim Hansen, President George W. Bush's top climate modeler, "we are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption." He gives us just a decade to change our ways. But as we are showing no signs yet of acting on the scale necessary, ours is probably the last generation that will experience a stable global climate. There is still so much we don't know about these so-called tipping points; we can't be sure of them until they happen and it is too late. But we can see what has happened in the past: relatively minor forcings have been amplified by positive feedback systems to produce much greater temperature changes. With greenhouse gas emissions we are engaging in what could be such a forcing.
The extent to which the environment can absorb and neutralize these emissions, and the point at which positive feedback mechanisms will tip to runaway temperature increases, is not clear. There is a growing consensus that we should prevent global average temperatures from rising by more than 3.6 degrees F above pre-industrial levels, or about 2.5 degrees above current levels. Beyond that I suppose we will know first-hand, and not from computer models, whether climate lurches with speed and violence when tipping points are reached.
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A good resource on "global warming" researches by Caramanna Giorgio (Italy) 4 Stars
November 19, 2008
As a researcher involved in the study of global warming and relates problems I have found this book very useful for a general and up-to-date picture of the researches linked to global warming topics.
The Author wrote concise chapters on the different aspects of the problem with a good references list at the end of the book.
I think this lecture may be of help for both "professionals" and common people that want to have a good idea on what is the current state of the research on global warming and on it's consequences on the future of our Planet.
The only problem I had reading this very good book was the use by the Author of the Imperial units instead of the Metric ones. Metric units are the only units officially used by the scientific community. On my opinion this conversion from Metric to Imperial should be avoided and this is the reason why I gave 4 stars and not 5.
In conclusion I strongly recommend the reading of this book to everyone that wants to have up-to-date information on the "hot topic" of global warming.
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truly compelling and informative by Daniel Nelson (White Bear Lake MN, USA) 5 Stars
September 19, 2008
Without doubt the best overview of our changing climate so far. This is a fact-based, agenda-free, clearly written assessment of where we are at. If read, I can almost guarantee you'll come away with a new or more compelling insight, no matter what side you are starting from. All you need is a modicum of intellect and curiosity. Read it Sen. Inhofe!!
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