Buy used:

£9.92

£2.80 delivery January 6 - 10. Details

Used: Good | Details

Sold by WeBuyBooks

Share <Embed>

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the author

Robert Kunzig

Fixing Climate: The story of climate science - and how to stop global warming Paperback – 2 July 2009

by Wallace S. Broecker (Author)

9 ratings

See all formats and editions

Amazon Price

New from

Used from

Kindle Edition

"Please retry"

£5.20

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

£3.61

£80.97

£0.82

Paperback, 2 July 2009

£9.92

—

£9.92

With Broeker as his guide, award-winning science writer Robert Kunzig looks back at Earth's volatile climate history so as to shed light on the challenges ahead. Ice ages, planetary orbits, a giant 'conveyor belt' in the ocean ... it's a riveting story full of maverick thinkers, extraordinary discoveries and an urgent blueprint for action.

Likening climate to a slumbering beast, ready to react to the smallest of prods, Broecker shows how assiduously we've been prodding it, by pumping 70 million tonnes of CO2 into the air each year. Fixing Climate explains why we need not just to reduce emissions but to start removing our carbon waste from our atmosphere. And in a thrilling last section of the book, we learn how this could become reality, using 'artificial trees' and underground storage.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Profile Books
Publication date

2 July 2009
Dimensions

12.9 x 2.2 x 19.8 cm
ISBN-10

1846688701
ISBN-13

978-1846688706
See all details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Robert Henson
24
Paperback
15 offers from £0.82

Product description

Book Description

We've heard lots about climate change - but what can we do about it? Wallace Broecker, the eminent scientist who coined the term global warming way back in 1975, believes in a techno-solution: 'artificial trees' to scrub CO2 directly from the air.

About the Author

Wallace S. Broecker is the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He was awarded the 2006 Crafoord Prize (the 'Nobel for GeoScience').

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Profile Books; Main edition (2 July 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1846688701
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1846688706
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 2.2 x 19.8 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 1,046,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 853 in Popular Science Weather
- 890 in Global Warming & Ecology
- 1,152 in Ecological Pollution

Customer reviews:
9 ratings

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Gates
6,916
Hardcover
in Environmental Civil Engineering
43 offers from £7.73
Mike Berners-Lee
852
Paperback
in Environmental Engineering & Technology
18 offers from £7.88
14,196
32 offers from £19.88

Customer reviews

5 star		47%
4 star		24%
3 star		15%
2 star		15%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Michael Hayes

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 July 2008

Verified Purchase

An excellant book. A well written and well paced overview of climate change: from ice ages through to the modern era.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Simon Loveday

Not quite convinced

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 November 2008

Verified Purchase

Fixing Climate, by Robert Kunzig and Wallace Broecker (Sort of Books, 2008)

Fixing Climate is an urgent book. It argues that humans are largely responsible for the recent climate change, and that that change poses new and great dangers: drought round the world, and hugely raised sea levels (as much as sixteen feet) caused by the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Two things are special about this book. The first is the case it makes for `abrupt climate change' - a swing from (say) temperate to tundra, from mild to freezing, occurring in a few centuries or less.

The second is that the authors maintain that attempts to regulate, control, and restrict man-made CO2 are doomed to failure. They look carefully at the options (including Kyoto, and the `carbon pie' of Pacala and Socolow) and dismiss almost all of them.

The only hope that the authors can see is to take carbon directly out of the atmosphere, using free-standing scrubbers, spread around the planet, to cleanse all our air. But to counteract the CO2 we produce each year would take 80 million such collectors - and they see major difficulties in disposing of the CO2 that these collectors would extract. Putting it back into the ground is expensive, laborious, and enormously ugly.

So this isn't an easy book: it is urgent, questioning - and worried. But is it convincing? Well, to me at least, not entirely. There are a number of areas where their facts are either contentious or simply wrong. (All the points below are drawn from published literature, in many cases IPCC publications, or from referenced websites.)

1. The thrust of the book is about `tipping points' - the unpredictability of `the climate beast'. But other respected `climate warners' - Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change , or Paul Hardaker, Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society - argue that `the idea of a point of no return, a "tipping point", is a misleading way to think about climate'.

2. `climate change is the most likely cause for an increase in forest fires' (p.117). The average acreage burned by forest fires has dropped by almost 90% since its peak in the 1930s (US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service).

3. `computer models reproduce well the observed spatial model' (p.158). They don't: `none of the models used by the IPCC ... corresponds even remotely to the current observed climate' - Dr Kevin Trenberth, principal author of the scientific section of the 2007 IPCC report.

4. `the Arctic has not been ice free in summer for a million years' . This is completely wrong. Arctic temperatures were higher in the 1930s than they are today (Climate Research Centre, UEA), and when The New York Times published a piece on unexpected free water at the North Pole, it had to publish an apology: `open water at the Pole is not unprecedented in summer' (NYT, August 29, 2000).

5. `perhaps the most dramatic example of global warming's impact on animals has been the plight of the polar bears, which hunt seals from sea ice in the Arctic' (p.160). Polar bears - which, as Kunzig and Broecker themselves point out in a different place (p. 169), have withstood far warmer Arctic temperatures during the past 125,000 years - are often cited as victims of global warming. In fact the threat to bears is human, in the form of hunting. The World Wildlife Fund report of 2002, oddly entitled Polar Bears at Risk, shows that polar bear populations are NOT declining.

6. `the World Health Organisation has estimated that global warming is already causing as many as 150,000 excess deaths a year' (p.161). The IPCC predicts `Reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure' (November 2007 Synthesis Report, table 3.2).

7. `it stands to reason that global warming will increase hurricanes' (p.162). Studies show that average windspeeds have decreased and the average number of hurricanes hitting the United States has dropped by 23% over the 20th century.

8. The book has a chapter called `Megadroughts', particularly aimed at the American Southwest. The Southwest is indeed a dry area - even if the residents insist on living as if it wasn't. But the book does not mention that over the 20th century, 8% of the United States has grown drier - and 25% has grown wetter.

9. The book cites Tuvalu, in the Pacific, as an example of `an island nation ... already sinking beneath the waves' (p. 168). Tuvalu is not sinking beneath the waves. All studies show that sea levels in that part of the Pacific are falling.

So this is certainly an urgent and passionate book. But the authors rightly point out that `urgent as it is, global warming is not the most urgent problem for most of humanity; human misery is'. I would agree with that, and would add `animal misery' to that list. So we should only make a full-on attack on global warming if we are sure - very sure - that it is a real and present danger; because the huge sums required to tackle it can only be found by diverting them from other very good causes - providing clean water, preserving rain forests, building schools, combating malaria, protecting endangered species, ending factory farming. This book makes a good case for the magnitude of the danger. But in my view it doesn't make the case for the probability of the danger. The sense of the book is of someone very tightly enclosed in his own world. At one point Kunzig remarks that `There is no computer in [Broecker's] office' (p.149). One can't help feeling that it would have been a better book if the office had contained one!

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Johan RF

well written.... but now obsolete.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 January 2012

Firstly let me stress I was looking forward to reading this book, as neither AGW religious not "skeptic" I enjoy reading books like this from a science-based factual basis. So first of all I was left with this question regarding this book : "WHERE is the science". rather than use detailed data and analysis, the authors chose to re-hash social commentary and alarmist myths that have no basis in truth. If you are already worshipping at the alter of AGW you will love this book because it gleefully ignores the actual facts about things like actual sea levels and actual global "extreme events" and seems to arbitrarily pick tenuous examples to prove points. The biggest problem I have with this book though is fundamental, they keep referring to climate models and IPCC projections like they have ANY CREDIBILITY !? This I find astonishing. Current global trends in climate and weather patterns show absolutely no correlation whatsoever to the discredited models of the 90s. The models say the global temperature is now soaring when in fact it is trending downwards since 1998. Also I did not see one graph or data-based evidence that would help the reader see the REAL global temperature patterns of the last 2000 years. Educating the reader in this fashion would be helpfull but I can see why they did not do this, because if they had it would render most of two chapters useless commentary. The hockey stick for most neutral observers is now obsolete history, a discredited con-trick. So why keep referring to it !? I would have loved this book to be more deeply searching in areas where they could disprove some of the claims of the so-called "skeptics". Another huge mistake for me was to talk about glaciers in a general sense as if to prove AGW without actually referencing any core peer reviewed material that was relevant. On the other side of the fence, Don Easterbrook in his book devotes a whole chapter to a puplished paper of global historic Glacial events evidenced by morraine research and carbon dating. The problem I have with the climate debate at the moment is too many bloggers and so-called "authors" are producing books on the subject without actually respecting the core values of science we are supposed to hold in high esteem. I would absolutely love to read a book that scientifically convinces me about some aspect of Climate change attributed to man. This is not it. The IPCC is NOT a scientific organisation. They may employ scientists who tell them what they want to hear perhaps but at the end of the day this is an organisation whose models are wrong and obsolete, who publish non peer-reviewed statements about Polar ice, Himalayan glacier dissappearance and many more. So why keep referencing them !? Its as if the authors don't live in the real world. To be fair to them (and this is a major point) this was written pre-climate gate so they still probably held people like Prof Jones in high esteem. Now we all know the shambles that was his work ethic we have the benfit of hinesight that they did not have. SO I would not recommend this book to anyone who likes evidence and rigour but you will like this if you like a whole book written on two major assumptions that most people are now starting to doubt. maybe they need to re-write or update this book !? I hope so because I would read it and hopefully give it 4 or 5 stars....

Helpful

M. Ellingham

Science book of the year?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 June 2008

This really is an outstanding book - or, perhaps, two outstanding books. The first half is essentially the (surprisingly compelling) story of climate science, told in parallel with the remarkable career of Wally Broecker. Its author, Robert Kunzig, wrote one of the great popular science books - Mapping the Deep: The Story of Ocean Science - and has that brilliant knack of slipping difficult science into a familiar, human narrative, so you "get it" without realising you're being challenged.
But it's the second half which is, literally, thrilling, as Kunzig and Broecker outline their vision of CO2 as a "fixable problem", just as the disposal of sewage was a century ago. Their fix is a radical invention by physicist Klaus Lackner (who sounds a genius) which will allow CO2 to be removed from the air by millions of car-sized "carbon scrubbers" and then sequestered in deep ocean or oil wells, or in basalt schists in Iceland.
This is a book that offers hope to the climate crisis. Not that the authors for a second make light of its seriousness: quite the reverse. But they feel that not enough will be done to reduce emissions until it's too late. Unless the Lackner machines can come to our rescue.
An absolutely vital book, and beautifully written. Science book of the year, in my opinion.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	AbeBooks Books, art & collectables	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Download Audiobooks	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	DPReview Digital Photography	Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations

Amazon Home Services Experienced pros Happiness Guarantee	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands

Amazon Warehouse Deep Discounts Open-Box Products	Amazon Business Service for business customers	Whole Foods Market We Believe in Real Food

Select Your Cookie Preferences

Follow the author

Similar authors to follow

Fixing Climate: The story of climate science - and how to stop global warming Paperback – 2 July 2009

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product description

Book Description

About the Author

Product details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Customer reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.