History of Climate Change: From the Earth's Origins to the Anthropocene

by Antonello Provenzale, Alice Kilgarriff (Translator)

Theories and opinions about climate change abound – from those claiming human-induced climate change is already beyond control to those who express scepticism about the real extent of these changes.  How should we weigh up the scientific evidence, and what role does climate change play in the history of the Earth? In this comprehensive history of the climate and climate change, Antonello Provenzale explains how the planetary climate system works and how the climate has evolved over millions of years.  Starting from the catastrophic events that marked the early history of the Earth, including seas of magma, global glaciations and mass extinctions, he demonstrates how the climate has fluctuated between hot and cold periods, with the Earth hot and lush with forests at certain times and almost entirely covered by a thick layer of ice at others.  The mechanisms that determine the modifications of the climate are multiple and complex and include external factors, such as solar luminosity and variations in the Earth's orbit, as well as internal processes connecting the atmosphere, the oceans, the crust, the mantle and the biosphere, composed of living organisms. While the climate has fluctuated a great deal over the Earth’s long history, there are two features of our current situation that are a source of real concern.  First, the rise in temperature of the last fifty years has been extremely fast, making it difficult for the environment to adapt to the new conditions.  Second, the human population is much greater than it was in the past, and this population needs water, food, energy and shelter to survive and flourish.  If temperatures continue to rise as they have in recent decades, ours will not be an easy world in which to live. To appreciate what is at stake, we need to understand how the climate works and how human activity is affecting it – not in order to save the planet, which will do just fine on its own and probably better without us, but to save ourselves.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published August 8, 2023

About the author

Antonello Provenzale (1958) si è laureato in Fisica nel 1982 e ha conseguito il Dottorato di Ricerca in Fisica presso l’Università di Torino nel 1987, con una tesi sui moti turbolenti a grande scala in oceano. Ricercatore presso il Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche dal 1987, è Dirigente di Ricerca dal 2007. Dal 2015 è direttore dell’Istituto di Geoscienze e Georisorse del CNR, con sede principale a Pisa.
Dal 2000, l’attività di ricerca si è focalizzata sempre più sulla dinamica del clima planetario, sulle interazioni fra geosfera e biosfera e sugli impatti dei cambiamenti climatici su ciclo dell’acqua, incendi e processi eco-idrologici. Recentemente, si è dedicato sullo studio della “Critical Zone”, lo strato vivente fra il fondo dell’acquifero superficiale e la cima della vegetazione che include le falde, il suolo e gli organismi che lo abitano, la vegetazione, e tutti i processi fisici, chimici, geologici, geomorfologici e biologici che controllano l’alterazione delle rocce, i cicli biogeochimici e il funzionamento degli ecosistemi terrestri. Collabora con il Parco Nazionale Gran Paradiso, con cui ha promosso la creazione del primo osservatorio di Critical Zone italiano all’altopiano del Nivolet.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most fascinating books I've ever read, and will probably be my favorite of this year.

There are many books out there discussing how modern human caused climate change works, and that to do about it. If that's what you're looking for, here are a few recommendations: What We Know About Climate Change by Kerry Emanuel is a short and straightforward overview by a climate scientist. Not the End of the World by Hannah Richie goes into great detail about what progress we have made and what we still need to do.

But if you want to understand out current place in the context of Earth's multi billion year history, this is the book you need to read. The final third covers in some detail the past couple centuries of climate change, and and overview of how climate models work. But the rest covers everything from the Hadean surface of Earth covered in magma, to the near complete freeze of Snowball Earth, to the Permian Eocene Thermal Maximum just after the Dinosaurs, and the slow decent into the (relatively) recent ice age.

Provenzale also covers the mechanics of ocean and wind currents, the effects of greenhouse gases, the way the positions and surfaces of the continents affect the Earth's reflective albedo, how the orbit and rotation of the earth determine the seasons, and the means by which we know all of these things. It is the climate science book I always wanted.

[Steven Townend · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very technical book with lots of numbers in W/m2. However I did learn a few things about the climate of the earth through it's history. One thing that was made clear is that the climate is a very complex system and not easy to define or predict. I was a little disappointed that there was only a couple of paragraphs given over to what we can do about climate change.