The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate

The bottom line for our forecast of the future is that the Earth has the ability to look after its own climate, but only if we are willing to wait a few hundred thousand years. It takes that long for the imbalance of CO₂ release and uptake back into the Earth to affect the CO₂ concentration of the atmosphere and ocean. The slow response time of Earth’s thermostat is the reason why our own climate experiment from releasing fossil fuel CO₂ will persist for hundreds of thousands of years into the

The bottom line for our forecast of the future is that the Earth has the ability to look after its own climate, but only if we are willing to wait a few hundred thousand years. It takes that long for the imbalance of CO₂ release and uptake back into the Earth to affect the CO₂ concentration of the atmosphere and ocean. The slow response time of Earth’s thermostat is the reason why our own climate experiment from releasing fossil fuel CO₂ will persist for hundreds of thousands of years into the future.

A climate change of the magnitude of the deglaciation of 5-6⁰C, would be catastrophic to human civilization. The forecast for future warming, 3-5⁰C, is less than that for deglaciation, but the warming would take the planet to a climate unlike any in millions of years. A climate shift of this magnitude would rearrange the landscape and societies of the Earth.

bring cutting-edge science to a general audience. The series provides the foundation for a better understanding of the scientific and technical advances changing our world. In each volume, a prominent scientist – chosen by an advisory board of the National Academy of Sciences members – conveys in clear prose the fundamental knowledge underlying a rapidly evolving field of scientific endeavor.

The environmentalists on the political left (the people who brought you 1.6 gallon toilets) have recently succeeded in getting ordinary light bulbs banned in the United States. The federal ban on incandescent bulbs is a clear violation of the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but unfortunately there are few people in Washington (or anywhere else) who give that technicality a second thought. Source: http://www.akdart.com/cfl.html