The Goldilocks Planet: The 4 billion year story of Earth's climate [Hardcover]

This book outlines the evolution of the Earth's atmosphere and how it encouraged life to diversify. So many processes and cycles are involved in developing and maintaining a supportive atmosphere with these being duly explained so you can create your own picture. This book could easily serve as a crash course in Earth history but, at whatever level you are at, you will learn something interesting.

Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams step back from the current climate debate to look at the broader geological context. Geology can be a bit of a closed book to the uninitiated. But the authors have an easy style, which illuminates both the incredible diversity of geological eras, and how it is that geologists are able to uncover so much detail about events that took place millions of years ago.

What stands out is how fortunate we have been, over the last 11 millennia or so (the Holocene), to have a level of climate stability that can sustain agriculture, long-term urban settlement, and the whole panoply of what we call 'civilisation'. If Earth has, for millions of years, been a Goldilocks planet (neither too hot nor too cold for life), then for human civilisation it is the Holocene that has been, like Goldilocks' porridge, just right. Before then, the authors make clear, abrupt changes in climate, triggered by huge increases in CO2, were commonplace, and hugely disruptive for all forms of life.

It is one of the strengths of this book that current climate concerns remain in the background throughout the early chapters, so that when they come into prominence towards the end, their significance is very much enhanced by what has gone before. The authors are careful not to over-egg their case, but their geological perspective does highlight possibilities for future climate development that are a lot more unpredictable, and scary, than IPCC computer model projections would suggest. And, as geologists, they are acutely aware that the impacts will not stop at the end of this century. The lessons from geological history would seem to be that although atmospheric concentrations of CO2 can rise rapidly (as they have, at our instigation, since the Industrial Revolution), it takes much, much longer for them to return to anything like the levels experienced before the rise started.

This is the sort of book that, once you've read it, you want to keep going back and dipping into. It's full of illuminating insights and connections, like this one on the last page: "We typically pay insurance (on houses, cars), to guard against slight risks of major damage. In considering global climate change, by contrast, there is generally agreed to be a large risk of very great damage.Those who say there is no risk are simply wrong. And yet the insurance premiums remain unpaid. Crazy, isn't it?"

Brilliant.