Ice Time: Climate, Science, and Life on Earth

by Thomas Levenson

Looks at the relationship between climate and the development of the earth, discusses current research, and warns of the dangers of disrupting the climate system

Genres: Science, Nonfiction

242 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1989

About the author

My day job has me professing science writing at MIT, where I teach in the Institute's Graduate Program in Science Writing.

I continue to do what I did before I joined the professoriat: write books (and the occasional article), and make documentary films about science, its history, and its interaction with the broader culture in which scientific lives and discoveries unfold.

Besides writing, film making and generally being dour about the daily news, I lead an almost entirely conventional life in one of Boston's inner suburbs with a family that gives me great joy.

Reviews

[Zjay · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit out of date. It seems like a series of disjointed essays, but it contains insights into the development of climatology and weather prediction. Chapter 5 is especially well done.

Part One (Chapters 1-6) contain many examples of how climatic change affected various peoples of the past. Part Three (Chapters 10-13) is about man's ability to change the climate and despoil the environment--pollute the rain, ravage the soil, seed the atmosphere with harmful chemicals, and conceivably end life on earth as we know it with nuclear conflagrations.

Part Two focuses on the uses of supercomputers in the 1980s to advance weather prediction and climate science. We can now smile when he goes on about the capabilities of the computers of those days, but Levenson at least records those early efforts. Now we are so inured to Weather Channel technologies that we forget the decades of research and experimentation it took to achieve what we now think of as normal.

Initially, researchers who studied the climate and weather patterns were merely reporters of what they observed. With the development of explanations for the El Nino phenomenon, weather prediction and climatology became a real science. Chapters 5-9 explain this transition rather well.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is somewhat dated (1989) for the some of the climate problems discussed like global warming and acid rain but it's very readable and provides a good background for the development of climate science. Climate science is a relatively young science because until supercomputers came along scientists didn't have the tools to construct & run complex 3-dimensional climate models. It also developed as a multidisciplinary field incorporating geology, physics, meteorology, oceanography and other specialties.

I found the discussion of past glaciations before the Pleistocene and the attempts to explain the causes of cycles of glaciations & warming periods especially interesting. I also found the discussion of the El Nino and La Nina events and how they affect weather around the globe fascinating.