A positive look at what we can do to reverse the damage we have done to our atmosphere. In this book Broeker explains how we need to clean up after ourselves comparing it to when sanitation was introduced to cities and soon diseases that had been rife where no longer a problem. Not only do we need to reduce our carbon emissions, but clean up, using “artificial trees” which would remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Quite when and how this might happen is still to be decided but this is a fascinating insight into how climate changes and how we effect it.
Likening climate to a slumbering beast, ready to react to the smallest of prods, Broecker shows how assiduously we’ve been prodding it, by pumping 70 million tonnes of CO2 into the air each year. Fixing Climate explains why we need not just to reduce emissions but to start removing our carbon waste from our atmosphere. And in a thrilling last section of the book, we learn how this could become reality, using ‘artificial trees’ and underground storage.
Robert Kunzig is a contributing editor on Discover magazine and author of Mapping the Deep, winner of the Royal Society Aventis Science Book of the Year.
Wallace S. Broecker is the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He was awarded the 2006 Crafoord Prize (the ‘Nobel for GeoScience’).
