Fascinating reading
It's not often that I find reading non-fiction books real page turners, but this book is really hard for me to put down. I picked it up at the Köln main station on impulse as I needed something to read for the train ride home and I have been both impressed and more than a bit frightened. It's clear that global warming is occuring and despite cynics, there is a preponderance of evidence that offers little doubt that this warming is being accelerated by the actions of man. The really scary part is what experts postulate on the potential impacts of such warming. If we look at the geographical record, the Earth has spent the entire duration in one of two states; glacial or interglacial. Since the last ice age, we've enjoyed a period of pretty temperate weather, with a brief blip about 14,000 years ago. This blip might be the best indicator of what might happen the next time the climate changes, as it was very abrupt, with a drastic change occuring not in the normal hundreds of years, but rather in the scope of a decade or less. The prognosis definitely doesn't look good. It's clear that nature doesn't do gradual change. When the climate change does occur it will be quite abrupt and there will be little that we can do about it. It's almost making me regret buying a house in a city where the majority of it is beneath sea level. Doh!
