Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Mr. Flygore and others have dispassionately summarized Under A Green Sky. Pardon me if I don't repeat their efforts. The significant theses which Peter Ward presents are: 1. geologically rapid climate change has been the underlying cause of most great "extinction" events. Those events have been, as S Gould hypothesized, major drivers of evolution.2. drastic climate change has not always been gradual; there is good empirical evidence of catastrophic warming events taking place in centuries, perhaps even decades. 3. the impact of atmospheric warming is most potent in its modification of ocean chemistry and of circulating currents; warming inevitably leads to non-mixing anoxic dead seas. 4. we are already in the middle, not the beginning, of an anthropogenic global warming, caused by agriculture and deforestation, which began some 10,000 years ago but which is now accelerating exponentially; though the earliest wave of anthropogenic warming has been stabilizing and beneficial to human development (civilization), it appears to have the potential for catastrophic effects within a lifetime or two. Mr. Ward's other recent book, Out Of Thin Air, makes the case for changes in atmospheric chemistry being a major driver of evolution at the level of family and even order. This book recapitulates some of that hypothesis and the evidence to support it. I can hardly imagine that you will want to read one without wanting to read the other. This book is the friendlier to the non-scientist, made readable by an anecdotal science-adventure framework. In short, it's a pleasure to read... until you catch the spoor of Ward's dire predictions for our common future. As a paleobotanist, Ward is well positioned to "see the whole picture" of climate change in the past, but he also points the reader toward other significant studies of the same events. One such is Tony Hallam's "Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities". Hallam is an oceanographic paleontologist; his research focuses on rising and falling sea levels, and on the causes and effects thereof, which he correlates very convincingly with extinction events, and which he presumes to be chiefly the result of tectonic plate movement. Ward's analysis based on atmospheric changes and Hallam's based on oceanic changes are, I dare say, more or less complementary. Both have radical implications for the current Darwinian model of evolution. Both have horrendously alarming implications for the fairly near future of humankind. I note that Under A Green Sky is ranked 22,897th in sales on amazon, with 12 reviews. For comparison, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years - a book of politicized pseudo-science - is 665th in sales, with 131 reviews, the majority gloatingly favorable. We're in trouble.