Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us about Our Future

Overview

By looking backward at the course of great extinctions, a paleontologist sees what the future holds.

More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90 percent of all species and nearly 97 percent of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists. 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 that extinction and others, he discovered that the near-total devastation at the end of the Permian period 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 a fascinating, globe-spanning adventure.

In Under a Green Sky, Ward explains how the Permian extinction as well as four others happened, and describes the freakish oceans--belching poisonous gas--and sky--slightly green and always hazy--that would have attended them. Those ancient upheavals demonstrate that the threat of climate change cannot be ignored, lest the world's life today--ourselves included--face the same dire fate that has overwhelmed our planet several times before.

Editorial Reviews

An astrobiologist with NASA who has written numerous books and articles about ancient mass-extinction events, Ward (paleontology, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Life as We Do Not Know It) presents evidence suggesting that some of the mass extinctions (i.e., die-offs of at least 50 percent of plant and animal life) of the distant past were the result of catastrophic global warming. In understandable language, he explains the science and draws a picture of what our world might look like after runaway global warming. His book gives readers a glimpse into the life of a scientist and how he works to collect evidence and fit it into the existing scientific worldview. Most important, it offers a look at how a scientific theory catches on, then changes as other evidence comes forth. There is also a 19-page bibliography for further reading on the topic. Although the technical level of the content may be beyond high school students, this excellent book is highly recommended for college and university libraries and public libraries with environmental science or global-change collections. [Ward has previously presented this argument in Science.--Ed.]--Betty Galbraith, Washington State Univ. Science & Engineering Lib., Pullman Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Peter D. Ward

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

882.49 KB

Number of Pages

256

eBook ISBN

9780061631672