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Earth's Climate: Past and Future ReviewI read this book twice, and wished I had had something like this available to me a few years ago, when I started venturing out into the unnumbered feedback loops, geochemical vagaries and regional idiosyncracies of Quaternary paleoclimatology, trying to form a general picture of it all. But this text isn't just about the Quaternary, mind you, this is a complete introduction to the main issues in Earth's climatology.
That it's mainly PALEOclimatology is unavoidable, since in my opinion "present climatology" is like a nonsense... Climate is an averaged evaluation of regional or global meteorological parameters through time, and the "present" is always too short for such an evaluation. Insight on climate evolution is only gained looking back in time, and projecting our analyses to an immediate future, so it's a science strictly dependent on timescales and perspectives... What we can tentatively tell about our climatic future is still too uncertain, but what was in the past is still available to inform and inspire us to further research, that's why Ruddiman's work is mainly about understanding what happened in the past...
My cheap philosophy aside, I think the author's aim was to introduce the subject from the basics, at a simplified level, in order to teach what kind of processes and interactions are involved in determining Earth's climate and its variability, without having inexperienced readers bogged down into technicalities of all sorts and all together (the necessary way of scientific articles delving deeper into any one very specific topic!). Hypotheses, problems and events are introduced gradually, with a captivating detective-like style, and the telescopic time-perspective (from longer geotectonic time-scales all the way down to centennial and decadal patterns and phenomena, dutifully lingering upon the Milankovic pacemaker) is just what's needed to have the right feeling brought home to students of how the Earth system evolves..
Details of this and that research threads are omitted to aid understanding of the general picture. Bibliographic references provide other information sources for those interested in more..
My own perplexity is on the second chapter: I doubt that such a quick overview of the workings of atmosphere and oceans is enough for those students that never touched any textbooks of meteorology or oceanography. A chapter twice as long would be more informative, I guess making those processes clearer at the outset of the journey would make several students more confident and help them grasp more of what will follow. I know the book is bulky enough already, but more pages and explanations need to be added to the second chapter for teaching's sake...
I have to disagree with the previous reviewer's negativity.. This is an introductory textbook, if any (paleo)climatologist's views had to be included, an encyclopedia would hardly be enough room for all of them!! The last two chapters, on global warming and future climate variability, are the best example of Ruddiman's balance and caution in explaining hypotheses, alternatives, possible fallacies and biases of sorts. As to the reviewer's question, "Who couldn't get a five-star rating discussing climate change and global warming with such a leitmotif?", I invite him to read my review of W.J.Burroughs' "Climate Change: a Multidisciplinary Approach" on the Amazon.co.uk website...
I really hope to see a second edition of Ruddiman's work in the next years, when times will be ripe for exciting updates and more hypotheses to tell...
Earth's Climate: Past and Future OverviewWritten from a multidisciplinary perspective by one of the field's preeminent researcher/instructors, Earth's Climate: Past and Future became a classroom favorite by providing an expert summary of climate change past, present, and future. The text worked equally well as either a nonmajors introduction to Earth system science or climate change, or as an upper-undergraduate-level overview of the processes and techniques in climate science.
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