Review by Booklist Review
Several good recent books, such as Richard B. Alley's Two-Mile Time Machine (2000) and Spencer R. Weart's Discovery of Global Warming(2003), have considered various aspects of radical climate change. Cox's overview covers those books' main topics and others. Each chapter has a particular focus. The first limns the original field research on polar ice, which occurred as part of a 1930 expedition to Greenland directed by the father of plate tectonics, Albert Wegener, who died, a victim of the cold, during it. The second concerns the 1930s discovery of a severe cold period directly preceding the last 12,800 years of the Holocene epoch. Succeeding chapters follow different avenues of subsequent research and theory, which together paint a dauntingly complex portrait of climate change. Abrupt shifts are common, and civilizations have perished during geologically short but deadly cold spells. The two chapters on the plethora of theories and of possible climatological causative factors make the most formidable reading, but the last chapter, Surprises, which cites evidence indicative of an approaching cold-shift and cautions that not enough is known to say whether human action, such as artificially increasing greenhouse gases, could push-start it, is the most provocative. Alley's book had a similarly cautionary conclusion and was just as well written, but Cox's more summary work is the book to read first and to circulate to the most readers. --Ray Olson Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
