Earths evolving climate: a geological perspective

To understand climate change today, we need to know how the Earth's climate has changed over the past 450 million years. This will involve contributions from a wide range of sciences. In Earth's Climate Evolution, Colin Summerhayes analyses reports and records of past climate change dating back to the late 18th century in order to uncover key patterns in the climate system. The book will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about future climate change.

Earth's Climate Evolution takes a unique approach to the subject, providing a description of the greenhouse and icehouse worlds of the 450 million years since land plants first emerged (and ignoring major earlier glaciations like that of Snowball Earth, which occurred around 600 million years ago, in a world free of land plants). It describes the evolution of thinking in palaeoclimatology, introducing the main players in the field and describing how their ideas were received and, in many cases, subsequently modified. It records arguments and discussions about the merits of different ideas that occurred along the way. It also includes several observations from the author's personal involvement in palaeoclimatological and palaeoceanographic studies, and from his experience of working alongside several of the major players in these fields in recent years.

This book will be an invaluable reference for both undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in related fields and will be of interest to historians of science and/or geology, climatology and oceanography. It should also be of interest to the wider scientific and engineering community, high school science students, policy makers, and environmental NGOs. --Book Jacket.

"Published in association with the Scott Polar Research Institute."

1. Introduction -- 2. The great cooling -- 3. Ice age cycles -- 4. Trace gases warm the planet -- 5. Moving continents and dating rocks -- 6. Mapping past climates -- 7. Into the icehouse -- 8. The greenhouse gas theory matures -- 9. Measuring and modelling CO b2 s back through time -- 10. The pulse of the earth -- 11. Numerical climate models and case histories -- 12. Solving the Ice Age mystery : the deep-ocean solution -- 13. Solving the Ice Age mystery : the ice core tale -- 14. The Holocene interglacial -- 15. Medieval warming, the Little Ice Age, and the sun -- 16. Putting it all together.