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Experimenting on a Small Planet : a Scholarly Entertainment.
This book is a thorough introduction to climate science and global change. The author is a geologist who has spent much of his life investigating the climate of Earth from a time when it was warm and dinosaurs roamed the land, to today's changing climate. Bill Hay takes you on a journey to unde...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Dordrecht :
Springer,
2012.
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| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
Tabla de Contenidos:
- Experimenting on a Small Planet; FOREWORD; PREFACE; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; Contents; Chapter 1 Introduction; 1.1 Leningrad: 1982; 1.2 'Global Warming' or 'Global Weirding'; 1.3 My Background; 1.4 What is Science?; 1.5 The Observational Sciences; 1.6 Summary; Chapter 2 The Language of Science; 2.1 Locating Things; 2.2 Trigonometry; 2.3 Map Projections; 2.4 Measurement in Science: The Metric System and All That; 2.5 Orders of Magnitude; 2.6 Exponents and Logarithms; 2.7 Exponential Growth and Decay; 2.8 Defining Some Words You Already Know; 2.9 Feedbacks; 2.10 Summary; Chapter 3 Geologic Time.
- 3.1 Age of the Earth: 4004 BC, or Older?3.2 The Discovery of the Depths of Time−Eternity; 3.3 Geologic Time Punctuated by Revolutions; 3.4 Catastrophism Replaced by Imperceptibly Slow Gradual Change; 3.5 The Development of the Geological Time Scale; 3.6 The Discovery of the Ice Age; 3.7 The Discovery of Past Warm Polar Regions; 3.8 Throwing a Monkey Wrench into Explaining Climate Change; 3.9 'Crustal Mobility' to the Rescue; 3.10 The Return of Catastrophism and the Idea of Rapid Change; 3.11 The Nature of the Geologic Record; 3.12 The Great Extinctions and their Causes.
- 3.13 Summary: A History with No Dates4 Putting Numbers on Geologic Ages; 4.1 1788: An Abyss of Time of Unknown Dimensions; 4.2 1863: Physics Comes to the Rescue-Earth is not More than 100 Million Years Old; 4.3 What We Now Know About Heat From Earth's Interior; 4.4 Some Helpful Background in Understanding 19th Century Chemistry; 4.5 1895-1913: The Worlds of Physics and Chemistry Turned Upside Down; 4.6 Henri Becquerel and the Curies; 4.7 Nonconformists and the British Universities Open to All; 4.8 The Discovery of Electrons, Alpha-Rays, and Beta-Rays.
- 4.9 The Discovery of Radioactive Decay Series, Exponential Decay Rates, and Secular Equilibrium4.10 The Mystery of the Decay Series Explained by Isotopes; 4.11 The Discovery That Radioactive Decay Series Might Be Used To Determine the Age of Rocks; 4.12 The Discovery of Stable Isotopes; 4.13 Rethinking the Structure of the Atom; 4.14 From Science to Science Fiction; 4.15 The Discovery of Protons and Neutrons; 4.16 Arthur Holmes and the Age of the Earth; 4.17 The Development of a Numerical Geological Timescale; 4.18 Summary; Chapter 5 Documenting Past Climate Change; 5.1 What is 'Climate'?
- 5.2 A Brief Overview of Earth's Climate History5.3 The Cenozoic Climate 'Deterioration'; 5.4 From Ages to Process Rates; 5.5 Radiometric Age Dating in the Mid-20th Century; 5.6 Potassium-Argon Dating; 5.7 Reversals of Earth's Magnetic Field; 5.8 Fission Track Dating; 5.9 Astronomical Dating; 5.10 Tritium, Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10; 5.11 The Human Acceleration of Natural Process Rates; 5.12 The Present Climate in its Geologic Context; 5.13 Steady State Versus Non-Steady State; 5.14 Feedbacks; 5.15 Summary.