My books arrived :-)

I have recently been watching a series of lectures. On ocean and climate, really interesting stuff but technical so not for everyone, top scientists talking on interesting issues for about 1hr:20 a lecture. One of these lectures was given by Richard Alley of Penn State University. I looked on Amazon and he has written a book on climate change called "The Two Mile Time Machine" which is based around his work as a paleo-glaciologist looking at ice cores from Greenland. I've only read five of the fifteen chapters but its going well so far, he really puts the climate variability humanity has experienced into context, and warns that historically climatic responses to change have been unpredictable in magnitude "Sometimes a small 'push' has caused the climate to change a little, but other times, a small push has knocked the earths climate into a different mode of operation, brining new weather patterns to much of the earth in just a few years or decades".

After looking at this book I noticed a couple others which looked interesting, my usual reading consists of a wide variety of reports, some news articles and in the past quite a bit of scientific literature for my chemistry course, but I thought it would be nice to read up some more on climate in particular, to build up my knowledge for this blog.

The other two books I bought are "The Great Ice Age: Climate Change and Life" and "Energy Systems and Sustainability: Power For a Sustainable Future". I have only looked at these to briefly, but I would say that the former has about as much information on the science of paleo-climatology as any non-professional could want, it is certainly a useful read if you are a climate change campaigner and want a good solid understanding of how the climate varies over different time periods and how anthropogenic climate change is different. The latter is a textbook, with all the related issues, hardly cutting edge, published 2003 with data fro a couple years before but appears to be an objective look at energy systems, explaining the various problems and potentials are.