Climate Crash is an excellent book that shows that climate is far more unstable than conventional wisdom thought possible, with our planet's climate tending towards either very warm or very cold. The most recent 10,000 years, in which humans learned to grow their own food, has been one of unusual stability. This long stable climate has created a mindset that fools us into thinking climate cannot change very quickly in a lifetime.



Using glacial ice cores and ocean sediment cores, paleo-climatologists have constructed a climate history that is anything but stable. I was expecting this book to have more on what global warming could do to society in the future, but most of the book is squarely set in the proven past. However, as historians like to say "past is prologue", which means that we can expect future climate to change rather quickly. Most likely, the change will be one of extreme warming because of the positive feedback cycles involved in a warmer world becoming warmer for a variety of reasons (melting ice caps expose more open ocean, which in turn heats up faster than ice caps).



Not really a global warming book, but a great book on climate change in the past and what it might portend for climate change in the future.