The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future

by Richard B. Alley

Book Overview

Richard Alley, one of the world's leading climate researchers, tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. In the 1990s he and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. Here Alley offers the first popular account of the wildly fluctuating climate that characterized most of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691102961
• ISBN13: 9780691102962
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Book

Richard B. Alley can spin a good yarn. The book was very enlighting, I enjoyed the professional script. My hat's off to him & wish him luck in his future endeavors regarding the issues of past climates.

Timely and important information about climate change

The whole issue of global warming has seemed confusing to the ordinary punter. On the one hand we hear dire warnings, on the other we also hear that "the jury is still out". This book was written by a scientist who was involved in analysing the information provided by ice cores during "three trips to Antarctica, five trips to Greenland, and countless hours in frozen laboratories". He knows what he is talking about. In this book he explains for the lay reader why the two-mile ice cores obtained from Greenland are so important, what they tell us about the Earth's climate in the past (and how this information is supported by other climate records), and what they suggest about the Earth's climate in the future. The ice core data is recent and very important. I think that anyone having read this book will be up to date with the latest scientific data on climate change and its scientific justification. While some of the information is rather technical, the author has successfully attempted to make it understandable, interesting and relevant for the non-scientist.

Superb presentation of solid (ice) science

The remarkable discovery of abrupt climate change is presented at what I considered just the right level. The annotated bibliography refers the reader to the original research papers. The acknowledgements are a graceful and detailed tribute to the author's colleagues. No superfluous material. The author's scientific personality shines through. This is the most enjoyable science book I've read in the past few years.

Certain Action Must Always Be Based On Uncertain Science

One of the most critical aspects of science appears on page 174 of The Two-Mile Time Machine by Richard B. Alley:ALL scientific ideas are subject to revision; we should never be absolutely sure that the truth has been reached. Old ideas should be tested continually, in an effort to tear them down and replace them with better ones. Ideas that survive this constant attack will be especially robust. Experience shows that if we behave as if these surviving ideas are true, we will succeed.... But, on the other hand, the ideas may be true, they may be reasonable approximations of the truth, or we may just be lucky.In science, no idea, be it speculation, hypothesis, theory, law, model, or FACT, is ever considered to be the final answer. That's the way science works. We ALWAYS act on uncertain answers; we never know if something is the truth with a capital T.The Two-Mile Time Machine is not only an excellent exposition of the use of ice core [and other] data to figure out the recent and future climate situation on Earth, but it is an excellent exposition of how science in general works. Richard B. Alley, a participating scientist in the GISP2 ice core project in Greenland, has written an easy-to-read, but pull-no-punches book on a complicated scientific topic. The book starts out with the basics of coring, dating, and analyzing ice, and takes the reader through to the political, social, and ethical implications of future climate changes, and concludes with Alley's take on what our responses should be. He always states how much uncertainty is attached to any of the ideas he writes about. If a person of a non-scientific background is going to have a complaint about the book, it will probably be that the book goes into too much detail about the evidence supporting the ideas.This book is highly recommended to anybody interested in Earth history, climate, Arctic research, the methods of science, and anybody who wants an excellent science read. The book is especially recommended to anybody interested in or involved in the debate over the future of the Earth's climate. All people involved in this issue need to UNDERSTAND the scientific details. The issue of the Earth's climate future has become way too politicized. Our actions are always based on ideas that have some level of uncertainty, but we must act, because the future of humanity will depend on what we do.

Deep Science, and Truly Pertinent

I have lived in a good many places in the world, and I think I have never lived in a place where people didn't voice the witticism, "If you don't like the weather here, stick around twenty minutes and it'll change." We are quite used to rapid changes in weather, and all of us seem fascinated by the way one day is different from another, or at the mistakes the weather forecasters make. Only over the past few decades, however, have scientists been able to get a grip on something else fascinating: climate. Ice in Greenland has been piling up year by year for 100,000 years. This ice carries inside it a record of the climate that produced each yearly layer. In _The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future_ (Princeton University Press), Richard B. Alley, who has done research in Greenland and Antarctica, gives us a view of his narrow and deep studies, and tells us why they are important. It is the first book for the layman to show how climate historians are doing their jobs, drilling five inch cores two miles down, and analyzing the ice in many clever ways. For most of the 100,000 year record, the climate has had wild jumps, centuries of cold followed by abrupt heating. Humans have lived in an anomalous period of stability. There have been climate changes that influenced human life, like the warm spell that lured the Vikings to Greenland and the cold that drove them out, but these represent one degree shifts shown in the recent ice records. Teensy temperature changes have made what we would consider big climate differences, but when it comes to the wild changes, we ain't seen nothing yet.Yet. Alley devotes the main part of his book, after showing how scientists draw facts out of buried ice, to discussing what drives global climate change over decades and over eons. He is able to paint a vivid, if brief, picture for those who are not acquainted with his field. His comparisons are felicitous, explaining that the ocean loses carbon dioxide when heated just as a carbonated soft drink would, or showing how a glacier pushes Greenland down into the deep, hot, soft rock below like a person sitting on a waterbed full of syrup. He is in no way a scaremonger, and takes the correct tentative tone because we don't have all the information yet. However, he concentrates on a switching mechanism involving the flow of the Atlantic Gulf Stream; it seems that minor changes in temperature or salinity may jam the "conveyor belt" of the oceans as they transfer heat from the equator to northern latitudes. If it does jam, the results for Europe would be disastrous, and it would affect the rest of the world as well. We know about this switch, and there must be others that we do not know about, and all of them may be vulnerable in our current period of stability to being switched off and making the climate careen again. His moderate advice is that climate change is inevitable, that it will trouble more people than it benefits, and