2019-08-01
Altogether, an interesting book about the worst mass extinction events in the fossil record, as well as en exploration of current climate change and future climate change possibilities.
Written like a newspaper article, it peppers personal interludes and short interviews with information on changes in the geological past, which made for easy and accessible reading.
Brannen does almost too good a job of describing how some of these scenarios might not just have played out, but may have also looked like in their aftermath. Probably the lasting image I’ll take from this is the horrors of ocean acidification, especially on the scale seen at the worst-recorded extinction event at the end of the Permian period, aka, The Great Dying.
Of course, this is pertinent to current climate change, and although the potential outcomes are clearly shown to be terrifying, it’s also made clear that humanity still has a chance to avert the worst – time is still on our side, if we make the effort to act.
However, a major flaw is that it is almost entirely focused on the role of the carbon-cycle. While the dangers of rising carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere are made clear time after time, it spends almost no time on the role of the sun on climate, and Milankovitch cycles get a brief single-sentence mention without even being named.
Perhaps there is an argument that the carbon-cycle is the ultimate planetary thermostat, but it seems strange to focus so much on vulcanism and plate tectonics as major causes while ignoring variability in solar output itself, which is arguably a main driver.
Even still, an interesting, engaging – and frightening – read.
Rating: 4/5