The Long Thaw

David Archer is professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, the author of "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast", and a frequent contributor to the Weblog RealClimate.

Acknowledgments xi Prologue. Global Warming in Geologic Time 1 An overview of the thrust of the book: human-induced climate change in the context of geologic time, in the past and in the future. SECTION I: THE PRESENT Chapter 1. The Greenhouse Effect 15 Fourier and greenhouse theory Early CO_{2 measurements Arrhenius and the forecast. Climate science since then. Chapter 2: We've Seen It with Our Own Eyes. 30 Testing the forecast Impacts already. Chapter 3: Forecast of the Century. 45 A century-timescale climate spike Temperature, rainfall, sea level, and storms SECTION II: THE PAST Chapter 4: Millennial Climate Cycles. 57 Abrupt climate transitions, and climate cycles on millennial timescales. The Little Ice Age and the Medieval Optimum climates Chapter 5: Glacial Climate Cycles 69 History of their discovery Ice flows and melts in quirky ways. Orbital forcing and CO2 forcing 69 Chapter 6: Geologic Climate Cycles. 78 Our ice age is unusual. The Earth is breathing. Chapter 7: The Present in the Bosom of the Past. 91 Climate change so far and in the coming century, compared with deglaciation, abrupt climate change, the Eocene hothouse, the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum event, and the K/T boundary. SECTION III: THE FUTURE Chapter 8: The Fate of Fossil Fuel CO2 Reservoirs of carbon, breathing 101 New carbon from fossil fuels equilibrates with the ocean and the land. Chapter 9: Acidifying the Ocean. 114 CO2 is an acid CaCO3 is a base. Neutralization takes millennia. CO2 remains higher than natural for hundreds of millennia Chapter 10: Carbon Cycle Feedbacks. 125 The short-term prognosis. The long-term prognosis. Chapter 11: Sea Level in the Deep Future. 137 If the past is the key to the future, we have the capacity to raise sea level by 50 meters, eventually. Chapter 12: Orbits, CO2 , and the Next Ice Age. 149 Interplay between orbital and CO2 climate forcings. The next ice age is about to be canceled. Epilogue: Carbon Economics and Ethics. 158 What the options are and how we decide. Further Reading 175 Index 179}