Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Carbon Control Knob
    The Carbon Control Knob
    The Carbon Control Knob
    Ebook29 pages22 minutes

    The Carbon Control Knob

    By Richard Alley and Eban Goodstein

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    On November 2, 2011, Richard Alley participated in The National Climate Seminar, a series of webinars sponsored by Bard College’s Center for Environmental Policy. The online seminars provide a forum for leading scientists, writers, and other experts to talk about critical issues regarding climate change. The series also opens a public conversation, inviting participants to ask questions and contribute their own thoughts.
     
    Dr. Alley conducts research on the paleoclimatic record at The Pennsylvania State University in order to understand the history, and perhaps the future, of climate change. In his lecture, Alley gave a concise overview of why we know what we know about climate change, and what that evidence can tell us about today’s warming planet. Alley not only provides an accessible science lesson, but reveals his own greatest concerns about climate change and offers advice to those who want to stop debating the subtleties of climate science and act now. 
    This E-ssential  is an edited version of Alley’s talk and the subsequent question and answer session. While some material has been cut and some language modified for clarity, the intention was to retain the substance of the original discussion.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIsland Press
    Release dateFeb 5, 2013
    ISBN9781610914130
    The Carbon Control Knob

    Related to The Carbon Control Knob

    Titles in the series (5)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Science & Mathematics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Celestial Wobbles

      Mar 12, 2023

      Celestial Wobbles
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Gaia Hypothesis Is Still Giving Us Feedback: Revisiting James Lovelock’s theory as it approaches 50.

      Apr 24, 2014

      I first met James Lovelock in 1988 at a conference on his controversial Gaia Hypothesis that was sponsored by the American Geophysical Union. Gaia, to remind you, was the mythical Greek goddess who embodied Mother Earth. The Gaia Hypothesis is the id

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Where the Ocean Exhales

      May 22, 2024

      When one thinks of Antarctica, one imagines a vast landscape in shades of blinding white, ice and snow stretching as far as the eye can see. But to really consider Antarctica is to consider its water. The Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, i

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong: A geologist explains that climate change is not just about a global average sea rise.

      Feb 18, 2016

      Jerry Mitrovica has been overturning accepted wisdom for decades. A solid Earth geophysicist at Harvard, he studies the internal structure and processes of the Earth, which has implications for fields from climatology to the timing of human migration

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong

      Jul 19, 2018

      Jerry Mitrovica has been overturning accepted wisdom for decades. A solid Earth geophysicist at Harvard, he studies the internal structure and processes of the Earth, which has implications for fields from climatology to the timing of human migration

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rocks Might Not Be Such a Good ‘Thermostat’ for Earth

      May 30, 2017

      The textbook understanding of global chemical weathering—in which rocks dissolve, wash down rivers, and eventually end up on the ocean floor to begin the process again—does not depend on Earth’s temperature in the way that geologists had believed, a

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Feeling the Heat

      Feb 7, 2019

      Feeling the Heat
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Braindump

      Oct 5, 2023

      Braindump
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      More Heat Than Light

      Jul 13, 2023

      Fortean Times is the broadest of churches, with scope for many contrasting views, but Barry Baldwin’s column on climate change from a classical history perspective deserves a response from the science corner. In “Weather Or…?” (FT431:15), he notes hi

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Q&A

      Mar 16, 2022

      Q&A
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      All At Sea

      Oct 18, 2020

      All At Sea
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How Earth Once Cooled Off

      Dec 27, 2023

      How Earth Once Cooled Off
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Carbon And The Carbon Cycle

      Dec 12, 2024

      Carbon And The Carbon Cycle
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Stone-cold History

      Jul 1, 2022

      Stone-cold History
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Soil Minerals Hang On To A Whole Lot Of Carbon

      Jan 7, 2019

      The minerals in soil can hold on to a significant amount of carbon pulled from the atmosphere, a new study shows. The finding could prove beneficial as the world tries to shift its carbon economy, researchers say. “We’ve known for quite a long time t

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Ice Ages Come And Go

      Feb 17, 2021

      Ice Ages Come And Go
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Did Volcanic ‘Geoengineering’ Cause a Huge Extinction?

      Jun 4, 2017

      A volcanic eruption 440 million years ago may have been so severe it killed off most of the animals that existed at the time. The mass extinction, one of the five largest in Earth’s history that came at the end of the Ordivician geological period, m

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Geological Mystery Solved By Meteorites

      Aug 12, 2020

      GEOLOGY Meteorites smaller than the width of a human hair have solved a riddle which has bemused geologists for decades. When the small meteorites sped through Earth’s atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago, Earth was not close enough to the Sun that liqui

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What Causes Ice Ages On Earth?

      Oct 6, 2021

      What Causes Ice Ages On Earth?
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Carbon Control Knob

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Carbon Control Knob - Richard Alley

      iStockphoto.com

      Introduction

      On November 2, 2011, Richard Alley participated in The National Climate Seminar, a series of webinars sponsored by Bard College’s Center for Environmental Policy. The online seminars provide a forum for leading scientists, writers, and other experts to talk about critical issues regarding climate change. The series also opens a public conversation, inviting participants to ask questions and contribute their own thoughts.

      Dr. Alley conducts research on the paleoclimatic record at Pennsylvania State University in order to understand the history, and perhaps the future, of climate change. In his lecture, Alley gave a concise overview of why we know what we know about climate change, and what that evidence can tell us about today’s warming planet. Alley not only provides an accessible science lesson, but also reveals his own greatest concerns about climate change and offers advice to those who want to stop debating the subtleties of climate science and act now.

      What follows is an edited version of Alley’s talk and the subsequent question and answer session. While some material has been cut and some language modified for clarity, the intention was to retain the substance of the original discussion.

      The Carbon

      Control Knob

      Seminar by Richard Alley

      I have the great good fortune to work on the history of climate. A longer version of my discussion here is available for free online at here

      When we read the history of climate, we get a very clear picture. It is indeed possible, with fairly high confidence, to figure out what climate was like in the past. We can recognize the deposits of glaciers spread across the landscape today and say, Look, they’re in places that are now warm. But there used to be ice there; it must have been colder.

      In the same way, we can reconstruct the factors that might have

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1