William F. Ruddiman
Auteur de Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate
6 oeuvres 245 utilisateurs 8 critiques
A propos de l'auteur
William F. Ruddiman recently retired as Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia.
Comprend les noms: W. F. Ruddiman, Wilism FRudimsn, William Ruddiman
Œuvres de William F. Ruddiman
A Terra Transformada 1 exemplaire
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Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Ruddiman, William F.
- Date de naissance
- 1943-01-08
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu de naissance
- Washington, D.C., USA
Membres
Critiques
Signalé
bnielsen | 1 autre critique | Jan 13, 2017 | Indeholder "About This Book", "About the Author", "Prologue. Did Civilization Develop in a Naturally Warm World?", "Part 1. A Mystery: Wrong-Way Greenhouse-Gas Trends", " Chapter 1. Natures Climatic Cycles", " Chapter 2. Wrong-Way Methane Trend", " Chapter 3. Wrong-Way Carbon Dioxide Trend", "Part 2. Early Agriculture: Answer to the CO2 and CH4 Mysteries?", " Chapter 4. The Fertile Crescent and Europe", " Chapter 5. China and Southern Asia", " Chapter 6. The Americas", " Chapter 7. Africa, Australia, and Oceania", "Part 3. Debating a New Hypothesis", " Chapter 8. Early Farming and Per Capita Land Use", " Chapter 9. How Should Interglacial Gas Trends Be Compared?", " Chapter 10. Natural Versus Anthropogenic CH4 Sources: Closer Scrutiny", " Chapter 11. Natural Versus Anthropogenic CO2 Sources: Closer Scrutiny", "Part 4. How Science Moves Forward", " Chapter 12. Falsification", " Chapter 13. Paradigm Shifts", " Chapter 14. An Emerging Paradigm for the Anthropogenic Era?", "Part 5. Early Human Effects on Climate", " Chapter 15. Is the Next Glaciation Overdue?", " Chapter 16. Other Climatic Effects of Early Land Clearance", " Chapter 17. The End of Northern Hemisphere Glaciations", "Part 6. Small Steps Back Toward an Ice Age", " Chapter 18. The Little Ice Age", " Chapter 19. Were the Drops in CO2 and CH4 Natural?", " Chapter 20. Mass Human Mortality and CO2 Decreases", " Chapter 21. Effects of Humans on Short-Term Greenhouse-Gas Reductions", "Epilogue", "Glossary", "Index ".
Mennesker er noget af et skadedyr, hvis man ser det fra planetens synspunkt.… (plus d'informations)
Mennesker er noget af et skadedyr, hvis man ser det fra planetens synspunkt.… (plus d'informations)
Signalé
bnielsen | Jan 10, 2017 | Indeholder "List of Illustrations", "Preface", "Part 1. What Has Controlled Earth's Climate?", " 1. Climate and Human History", "Part 2. Nature in Control", " 2. Slow Going for a Few Million Years", " 3. Linking Earth's Orbit to Its Climate", " 4. Orbital Changes Control Ice-Age Cycles", " 5. Orbital Changes Control Monsoon Cycles", " 6. Stirrings of Change", "Part 3. Humans Begin to Take Control", " 7. Early Agriculture and Civilization", " 8. Taking Control of Methane", " 9. Taking Control of CO2", " 10. Have We Delayed a Glaciation?", " 11. Challenges and Responses", "Part 4. Disease Enters the Picture", " 12. But What about Those CO2 "Wiggles"?", " 13. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Which One?", " 14. Pandemics, CO2, and Climate", "Part 5. Humans in Control", " 15. Greenhouse Warming: Tortoise and Hare", " 16. Future Warming: Large or Small?", " 17. From the Past into the Distant Future", "Epilogue", " 18. Global-Change Science and Politics", " 19. Consuming Earth's Gifts", "Afterword to the Princeton Science Library Edition", "Bibliography", "Figure Sources", "Index".
Klimaforandringer og menneskets store indflydelse på det seneste. Ruddimans teori er at det begyndte allerede med landbruget, dvs for tusinder af år siden og at det har udskudt en istid.… (plus d'informations)
Klimaforandringer og menneskets store indflydelse på det seneste. Ruddimans teori er at det begyndte allerede med landbruget, dvs for tusinder af år siden og at det har udskudt en istid.… (plus d'informations)
Signalé
bnielsen | 4 autres critiques | Dec 6, 2016 | This is a carefully written hypothesis -- or three separate hypotheses -- to do with human impact on climate. The first two have the most space devoted to them. They assert that over the past 8,000 and 5,000 years respectively, the effect of humans in clearing forests for agriculture and irrigating lowlands for rice cultivation caused increases of carbon dioxide and methane which in turn kept global temperatures high enough to prevent the onset of the next glaciation. It's a good hypothesis and it feels indisputable. But I didn't read enough discussion about the complete cycles involved to totally convince me. He mentions it when discussing climate modelling very briefly: "the models attempt to simulate all of these interconnected responses [of carbon dioxide and methane concentrations in the atmosphere, temperature, ice volume, etc.] rather than analyzing them one-by-one in isolation". But for simplicity's sake he does here consistently analyze factors individually and in pairs, to make his argument. It's not a big flaw but it'd have been nice to see more discussion of how, for example, carbon dioxide, ice volume, and temperature relate to one another. But then you get into one hell of a confusing tangle of interconnected factors, so I can see why he didn't go there. Actually, not unlike the solubility of carbon dioxide in the oceans, which he admirably boils down to a single paragraph.
Anyway, those first two arguments about carbon dioxide and methane are good, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them form a central element in the future understanding of Pleistocene climate change. The last hypothesis is about pandemics causing the short-term drops in temperature over the past 2,000 years. Not so convincing. On balance I think his case is decent, but he had me cringing for half a dozen pages as he listed, in detail, European plagues, without mentioning the large numbers of people in India or China, or the mechanism by which population decline causes carbon dioxide concentrations to drop. Only at the end did he mention farm abandonment and reforestation as the mechanism, and that population densities in East Asia were high enough long enough ago that it didn't happen even with plagues. Fair enough. It's an interesting hypothesis but honestly the data presented here on both sides (two poorly matched ice core CO2 curves, and a cursory glance through the pandemic history of (mostly) Europe) are not good enough to convince me.
The last part is an interesting and brief glimpse at the industrial revolution's effects on climate that we are all probably sick of arguing about. It's interesting because it's the same stuff as usual but seen through a palaeoclimatologist's eyes, which is a much less gloomy perspective. The industrial CO2 pulse will go into the atmosphere, and then the ocean will soak it up. Life will go on. CO2 concentrations will return to their naturally, orbitally-forced decline, and a glaciation may or may not resume. The ice caps will not melt, due to their massive thermal inertia, although they may change a little around the edges. These are not predictions that rest on massive and much-argued-about general atmospheric circulation models, but simple consideration of all the causal relationships and response times. He does point out that by far the biggest casualties of our industrial CO2 emissions will be (1) the future cost of energy for humanity, once we've burned so much of our inherited carbon; and (2) the oceans. This last point he does not stress enough. The carbon we're burning in the form of coal and oil is going in the atmosphere, sure, and it will cause temperatures to spike, although we've already been doing that, as is the point of this book, for 8,000 years. But on a geological scale we're really pumping it into the oceans, which has the effect of acidifying them and irreversibly changing the ecosystems within them, if not (hopefully not) their thermodynamics.
His final point is a disclaimer for climate change denialists, and an odd but reasonable defense, wherein he says that the industrial CO2 input is bad, but not the worst thing we're doing to the Earth. Instead he lists: the destruction of ecosystems and ignorance of ecosystem services (e.g. forests), the depletion of fresh water, esp. groundwater, on a gigantic and irreversible scale, and the erosion and loss of lovely glacial sediments (topsoil) in prime agricultural land. Amen to those.… (plus d'informations)
Anyway, those first two arguments about carbon dioxide and methane are good, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them form a central element in the future understanding of Pleistocene climate change. The last hypothesis is about pandemics causing the short-term drops in temperature over the past 2,000 years. Not so convincing. On balance I think his case is decent, but he had me cringing for half a dozen pages as he listed, in detail, European plagues, without mentioning the large numbers of people in India or China, or the mechanism by which population decline causes carbon dioxide concentrations to drop. Only at the end did he mention farm abandonment and reforestation as the mechanism, and that population densities in East Asia were high enough long enough ago that it didn't happen even with plagues. Fair enough. It's an interesting hypothesis but honestly the data presented here on both sides (two poorly matched ice core CO2 curves, and a cursory glance through the pandemic history of (mostly) Europe) are not good enough to convince me.
The last part is an interesting and brief glimpse at the industrial revolution's effects on climate that we are all probably sick of arguing about. It's interesting because it's the same stuff as usual but seen through a palaeoclimatologist's eyes, which is a much less gloomy perspective. The industrial CO2 pulse will go into the atmosphere, and then the ocean will soak it up. Life will go on. CO2 concentrations will return to their naturally, orbitally-forced decline, and a glaciation may or may not resume. The ice caps will not melt, due to their massive thermal inertia, although they may change a little around the edges. These are not predictions that rest on massive and much-argued-about general atmospheric circulation models, but simple consideration of all the causal relationships and response times. He does point out that by far the biggest casualties of our industrial CO2 emissions will be (1) the future cost of energy for humanity, once we've burned so much of our inherited carbon; and (2) the oceans. This last point he does not stress enough. The carbon we're burning in the form of coal and oil is going in the atmosphere, sure, and it will cause temperatures to spike, although we've already been doing that, as is the point of this book, for 8,000 years. But on a geological scale we're really pumping it into the oceans, which has the effect of acidifying them and irreversibly changing the ecosystems within them, if not (hopefully not) their thermodynamics.
His final point is a disclaimer for climate change denialists, and an odd but reasonable defense, wherein he says that the industrial CO2 input is bad, but not the worst thing we're doing to the Earth. Instead he lists: the destruction of ecosystems and ignorance of ecosystem services (e.g. forests), the depletion of fresh water, esp. groundwater, on a gigantic and irreversible scale, and the erosion and loss of lovely glacial sediments (topsoil) in prime agricultural land. Amen to those.… (plus d'informations)
1
Signalé
seabear | 4 autres critiques | May 29, 2013 | Listes
Prix et récompenses
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- Œuvres
- 6
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- 245
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- #92,910
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En gennemgang af klimastudier og hvordan man kan finde ud af hvad der er sket for millioner af år siden. Dybt fascinerende.… (plus d'informations)