There is no book about the history of climate change; this book will fill that gap by providing explanations of the natural processes that have led to dramatic changes in the Earth’s climate over the past 4.6 billion years. The purpose is to allow non-experts to understand the long history of climate change on Earth, a history that is written in the geological records. Although reading and interpreting those records may be the obsession a minority of geoscientists, they include information that everyone should be aware of because it can help us to understand why we are facing a climate crisis, how serious that crisis actually is, and why we need to act quickly to prevent the crisis from becoming a disaster.
A Brief History of Climate Change will include descriptions and explanations of climate-change processes that operate on the scale of billions of years (the evolution of the Sun), hundreds of millions of years (plate motions and continental collisions), tens of millions of years (volcanic eruptions, or changes to major ocean currents), tens to hundreds of thousands of years (Earth’s orbital variations), and centuries to decades (sunspot variations and short-term ocean current cycles). The goal is to provide an accessible background to the natural processes that have driven climate change over the Earth’s history. Each chapter will focus on one such process and will include examples of when and how that process has worked in the past and what the results were like. In each case there will be an explanation of why that specific natural process cannot be implicated as a driver of the current episode of climate change, along with what it teaches us about what to expect in the coming years and decades (or longer), and what we can do to limit the damage to the planet.
Why me? I have a BSc in Earth Science (U. of British Columbia) and a PhD in Geochemistry (Imperial College, U. of London, UK) and have been working as a geologist for 45 years, including 35 years of post-secondary teaching. My teaching (at Vancouver Island University and Thompson Rivers University) has included a wide range of Earth Science courses, including a course on climate change from a geological perspective.
I am the author of the textbook Physical Geology (1st edition 2015, 2nd edition 2019) that is widely used across Canada and the United States (https://opentextbc.ca /physicalgeology2ed/). For the past century geology students at Canadian universities and colleges have been learning from books published in and illustrated with examples from the United States. It is a delightful irony to me that thousands of American students are now using a geology textbook illustrated with examples from Canada. This book includes a chapter on climate change.
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