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Under a Green Sky | 
| Manufacturer: HarperCollins e-books
Category: EBooks
List Price: $11.95
Buy New: $9.56
You Save: $2.39 (20%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 21673
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Dewey Decimal Number: 577
ASIN: B0015WAOQM
Publication Date: March 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90% of all species and nearly 97% of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists, and during the 1990s and the early part of this century a great battle was fought between those who thought that death had come from above and those who thought something more complicated was at work. Paleontologist Peter D. Ward, fresh from helping prove that an asteroid had killed the dinosaurs, turned to the Permian problem, and he has come to a stunning conclusion. In his investigations of the fates of several groups of mollusks during those extinctions and others, he discovered that the near-total devastation at the end of the Permian was caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide leading to climate change. But it's not the heat (nor the humidity) that's directly responsible for the extinctions, and the story of the discovery of what is responsible makes for an fascinating, globe-spanning adventure.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 A must read. August 1, 2008
This is a very well written book about very difficult subject matter. Ward takes you on his own scientific journey which led him to startling and terrifying conclusions about human kind's present course. As a physician and former scientist I would say the science seems solid. He weaves a cogent, highly interesting tale about the history of climate change and how it brought about the horrific mass extinctions in our geologic near past. There is tangible mayhem in these past apocalypses, and the author does a vivid job of relating it to the reader in an easy to understand manner. Underlying the seam of these apocalypses is the dark realization that humans have placed the earth on a course we might not easily be able to change (if at all). And future generations might very well know the mechanism of their doom, and they would certainly know that we are the ones who doomed them.
I would have liked to have seen a bit more detail in the scientific analytic processes, but too much detail might have taken this book away from its intended audience. Its intended audience is anyone who will listen to reason and cares about their children. This is a must read. It is possible that it is the most important subject matter ever written in a book.
Global Warming: Lots of Conflicting Data & No Easy Answers July 23, 2008
In UNDER A GREEN SKY, Peter Ward approaches global warming from the interesting perspective of historical geology and paleontology. Ward notes that when many scientists and the general public discuss global warming and its repercussions for humanity, they tend to place it in the context of CO2 emissions and a general increase in temperature. Ward takes this discussion and extends it to the various mass extinctions that have plagued the earth over the last few hundred million years. The biggest and baddest extinction of all time was undoubtedly the one that struck at the end of the Permian, roughly 230 million years ago. Scientists now think that more than 90 percent of all life, both on land and in the seas, was extinguished. Ward focuses on the various causes of that extinction and on the one that wiped out the dinosaurs at the close of the Cenozioc some 65 million years ago. He notes some commonalities. It is true that a colossal asteroid struck the earth in the latter case, but he notes that in the Permian extinction and to a lesser extent in the Cenozoic was a witches' brew of global warming, a belching forth of volcanic noxious gases, the slowing down and ultimate cessation of the Atlantic Ocean conveyer belt of warm currents from the Equator, and most devastating of all, a change in the chemistry of the oceans themselves from oxygen bearing to anaerobic oxygen depletion. Ward considers a dreadful confluence of events that begins with global warming and leads to a sky that is tinged with a permanent green, hence the title. At this point, it is too late for any surviving species to do no more than to try to burrow into whatever miserable ground hole they can find.
What makes UNDER A GREEN SKY so powerful is Ward's ability to yank the modern reader from the comfortable world of today and metaphorically transport him back to a number of past aeons where the sky was more green than blue. As that reader treads the very earth that is choking under a vicious cloud of suffocating fumes, he will surely ponder whether history will repeat itself yet one more time even as supposedly intelligent species like us can foresee such crises yet refuse to derail them. UNDER A GREEN SKY is the book of the decade.
Interesting speculation on cause of past extinctions July 17, 2008
I read the Scientific American article a while back and this book further explains the potential link between greenhouse emissions and the great mass extinctions of the past. Well written and an interesting read.
Do you have a car? July 7, 2008
If you do, you are, in large measure, part of the problem. People squawk about environmental calamity but few are prepared to moderate their own behaviour where it counts.
As a geologist also working on planetary climate change issues, I fear that Ward is right: the world's fresh water content has not changed significantly since Palaeo-Mesozoic highstand times, neither has the mean elevation of the continental masses, so the geohistorical sea level record tells us pretty much what's going to happen once tipping point is reached. When all the triggers for basal melting kick in (in their undoubtedly complex and unmodellable way) every major city outside of Bhutan, Bolivia and Ecuador will be under water. And we'll all die the same death, rational and doubter, good and bad alike. The geologist understands the signals and the consequences, but it is regrettable all the same...
"Go Green", but Not Like This! May 14, 2008
Another scary but informative book about our world's past, with frightening implications for the future. Recommended reading, along with "Hell and High Water", and "With Speed and Violence", which are both books about climate change and the effects of human action. The window is closing -- we have to act now!
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