BOOK REVIEW Review:
THE WHOLE STORY OF CLIMATE “What Science Reveals About the Nature
of Endless Climate Change” By E. Kirsten Peters, Ph.D. William M. Greenslade, CPG-02505, P.E., R.G.
As a geologist who has been following the public discussion of climate change, I have wondered why usually little or no information is presented about the history of climate on the earth and what it can inform us about the current and future projections of climate conditions. I am happy to say that a geologist has “stepped up” to fill this important gap, and in a book that is both informative and entertaining. While it contains significant scientific information and data, it avoids jargon and is written for a non-scientific audience.
Dr. Peters is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard in geol- ogy and an author and teacher. In this book she wades into the ‘climate wars’ with a strong geology foundation and an obvious love for our particular branch of science. “The Whole Story of Climate” is published by Prometheus Books®, and is available on Amazon in hard or electronic formats.
Dr. Peters lays the foundation of her principal thesis that climate is always changing—by taking the reader through a Who’s Who of historical naturalists and geologists and the contributions of each to understanding the Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs of earth history. If you are like me, you will remember a few of the names from your physical and histori- cal geology courses, but this book will likely introduce some you have forgotten (or never learned about) and give you a new (or renewed) appreciation for the profession and the people who have formed our understanding of the earth and its history. In Dr. Peter’s march through the development of science’s understanding of the monumental climate changes in the Pleistocene you will meet and get to know Luis Agassiz, Charles Lyell, Charles Whittlesey, T. C. Chamberlin, G. K Gilbert. J. Harlan Bretz, Thomas Jefferson (very briefly), Baron Georges Leopold Chretien Frederic Dagobert Cuvier, Alexandre Brongniart, Gerhard Jakob de Greer, Ernst Jacob Lennart von Post, Andrew Ellicott Douglass (not a geologist but an astronomer and father of dendrochronology), Alfred Wegener (too briefly), Ernst Sorge, James Croll, Milutin Milankovitch (a Serb engineer), Harmut Heinrich, Gerald Bond, among others.
The book is organized more or less chronologically from the earliest understanding of the evidence for the enormous change in climate during the Pleistocene Epoch to the current debate about global warming. Its twelve chapters lead the reader through the scientific discoveries, successes and failings of the authors of much of what is known from the geologic record and related research about climate in the Quaternary. Readers will learn of glacial processes, varves, pollen in swamps, tree rings, ice cores, sea-bed cores and human development from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, and what informa-
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tion these processes and events yield about the history of climate on the earth.
In support of her thesis that climate is always changing, Dr. Peter’s introduces the reader to regular patterns of cli- mate change that are named for the researchers that iden- tified them, including Milankovitch, Heinrich, Dansgaard/ Oeschger, and Bond cycles. Of particular interest to this reviewer is the evidence for Rapid Climatic Change Events (RCCEs—“Rickies”), where major regional or even global cli- mate has changed in as little as few decades or over a typical human lifetime.
The last 10,000 years (Holocene Epoch) have seen a damp- ening of the cycles that occurred during the Pleistocene, with climate being generally warm (and even warmer than today) and relatively stable compared to the previous epoch. Dr. Peters notes that it is “certainly disquieting to meditate on the fact that the Holocene has already run for ten thousand years, longer than many of the warm periods that have occurred in the past two million years.”
While the bulk of the book is devoted to a review of what the geologic record says about climate during the past two million years, Dr. Peters does not ignore the current debate on the role of humans in climate change. She devotes a chapter to the hypothesis of William Ruddiman that the evolution of humans from hunter gathers to an agricultural society over the past 5,000 years may have contributed to an unexpected increase in methane and carbon dioxide, powerful greenhouse gases, in a period when the sun’s energy striking the earth should be decreasing based on the Earth’s orbital variations around the sun. Using the detailed evidence from ice-core research and estimates of human agricultural and domestication of rumi- nant animals, Ruddiman concluded that methane and carbon dioxide produced by human activities over the past millennia accounts for an increase in global average temperature of about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit; this is before the rapid growth in industrialization and population.
The last two chapters cover the scientific evidence for and against anthropological global warming as well as how the media, special interests and the political class have used, or misused, science to advance a point of view. Whatever your proclivities toward the current ‘alarmist’ or ‘denier’ views of climate change as expressed in the media, you will find something in “The Whole Story of Climate” to bolster your preconceived notions; you might even find something to change them! Regardless, you will appreciate the importance of geo- logic input to the debate, the evident love of the profession we have chosen and the clarity and entertaining prose of Dr. Kirsten Peters.
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