Energy, Biology, Climate Change

By J. Emil Morhardt

Energy, biology, and climate change interact, often in unpredictable ways; they are the three main characters in a scenario that appears to be permanently transforming Earth's biosphere. By now everyone gets the big picture, though the quotation following quotation by Jonathan Franzen, a novelist writing in The New Yorker on April 6, 2015, says it more clearly than most scientists would: "We're taking carbon that used to be sequestered and putting it into the atmosphere, and unless we stop we're fucked." The carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, is a result of our intense use of fossil fuels as humanity's main source of energy for the past century or two. It took several hundred million years of photosynthesis to sequester that carbon, but it will take us only several hundred years to release it, so it should come as no surprise that there are consequences. Is there any reasonable way stop, and still have enough energy? How much damage to society and the ecosystem has the additional carbon caused already, and how much will it cause in the future? These questions are addressed by thousands of scientists, engineers, and economists in thousands of technical papers published each year. This book summarizes over 200 of the best of them published within the past year. It will give you a good sense of many of the issues, how much scientists currently know about them, and what they think is likely to happen next. One way to think of this is as the most complicated serialized mystery story ever written. We have a pretty good idea whodunit...we just don't know for sure yet what we have done. Reading this book will get you closer to figuring it out.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0996353607
• ISBN13: 9780996353601
• Release Date: May 2015
• Publisher: Cloudripper Press
• Length: 366 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary