Global Warming

David Archer is the author of Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, published by John Wiley and Sons and a book for popular audiences called The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 years of the Earth's Climate, published by Princeton University Press and winner of the 2009 Walter P. Kistler Award, The Foundation for the Future. Since 1993, Archer has been a professor in the department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and has worked on a wide range of topics pertaining to the global carbon cycle and its relation to the global climate, with a special focus on ocean sedimentary processes such as CaCO3 dissolution and methane hydrate formation and their impact on the evolution of atmospheric CO2. He currently teaches classes on global warming, environmental chemistry and global geochemical cycles.

Online Models v

Preface vii

1 Humankind and Climate 1

Part I The Greenhouse Effect 7

2 Blackbody Radiation 9

3 The Layer Model 19

4 Greenhouse Gases 29

5 What Holds the Atmosphere Up? 43

6 Weather and Climate 57

7 Feedbacks 73

Part II The Carbon Cycle 87

8 Carbon on Earth 89

9 Fossil Fuels and Energy 103

10 The Perturbed Carbon Cycle 119

Part III The Forecast 133

11 The Smoking Gun 135

12 Potential Climate Impacts 153

13 Decisions, Decisions 173

Glossary 191

Index 197