The Global Carbon Cycle
Climate change worriers have been on a steep learning curve for years. Desperate for certainty about the carbon cycle and how it affects climate, they’ve been grappling with concepts like “parts per million”, “feed back loops”, “CO2 equivalents” and “carbon sinks”. Reliance on the media as a primary teacher simply has added to the confusion. Most journalists don’t understand it either.
And yet understanding is important. Thus the need for David Archer’s useful and very readable primer.
If you are looking for easy answers and reassuring noises, go somewhere else. But if you want to understand why scientists can’t seem to find consensus on climate change then this book, through its honest recognition of how much we don’t know and what we can’t completely predict, will help.
Our uncertainty, says Archer, arises in part because we all occupy several different timescales at once: the geological, the ice age (where we still are) and the present moment that is moving us inexorably into the future.
The carbon cycle looks very different depending on which timescale you focus on. Over geological time a large amount of carbon in the atmosphere served normalised the hothouse temperatures necessary to kick-start life. Over ice age time, large sudden emissions of carbon into the atmosphere caused dramatic changes in global temperatures. In the here and now, when we are belching so much additional CO2 into the atmosphere, we are still trying to understand which way it might go. Maybe the climate is self stabilising – maybe it’s not.
The take-home message, however, seems to be that maintaining business as usual, in the form high man-made CO2 emissions, is rather like poking a bear with a stick. Eventually you’re going to get hurt – or dead.
The Global Carbon Cycle
David Archer
Princeton,
Hardback
£16.95
- This review was published in the May 2011 edition of Geographical.
