{"id":683,"date":"2013-02-18T23:12:10","date_gmt":"2013-02-18T12:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/?p=683"},"modified":"2013-02-18T23:12:10","modified_gmt":"2013-02-18T12:12:10","slug":"reconstructing-earths-climate-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/?p=683","title":{"rendered":"Reconstructing Earth’s Climate History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"stjohn\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Rating:<\/strong> \"★\"\"★\"\"★\"\"★\"\"☆\"<\/p>\n

Kristen St John, R Mark Leckie, Kate Pound, Megan Jones and Lawrence Krissek. 2012. Reconstructing Earth’s Climate History. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978 1 1182 3294 1<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Over the years there have been hundreds (probably thousands!) of books published on just about every topic in the climate change canon. Rarely, there’s a book that looks at something from a completely new angle. One of the issues that has surrounded climate change from the beginning is that it often assumes that the techniques behind the science are well known. If you look at other sciences this is not usually the case. Take geology for an example. There are numerous books dealing with fundamental principles from mapping to minerals. Climate science doesn’t seem to follow this path. In some ways, this is understandable – it’s a highly complex analysis of advanced practical techniques. It’s not the sort of research that the average senior school or university student would be looking at. I wonder if there isn’t a key point there. We expect students to appreciate the results but there is little hands-on (or even virtual) experience of the techniques. Might people get a better grasp if they understood how the data were arrived at? That’s where this text comes in. It has a basic philosophy – addressing how we know is as important as addressing what we know<\/em>. There’s pedagogical merit in this. The aim, therefore, is to see to what extent the authors have been able to achieve their objectives.<\/p>\n

The opening pages bode well. The introduction spells out the direction the book is taking (from basic concepts to more complex situations). For teachers\/lecturers there’s a very clear table mapping chapters against scientific concepts, skills and the principles of climate science)<\/a>. Moving into the text, chapter one looks at the basics of climate records, namely ice cores and sediments. Examples focus on a range of data e.g. sediments, speleothems, tree-ring data. Readers are introduced to the notion of proxies-\u00a0 a key issue in determining past climates. A second case study examines records over almost 800,000 years whilst a final case gets the reader to consider the difficulty of getting these samples in the first place. Taking this first chapter as a case we see a carefully designed trend. The overview gives an indication of the topics whilst the cases increase in complexity or difficulty. Chapter two looks at seafloor sediments and the ways in which sediment cores can be used to construct climate records and therefore describe climate change. The next two chapters examine issues of dating using biological and magnetic properties of sediments respectively. From this point, the remaining ten chapters focus on one particular area of research, geography or time. There’s a chronological focus starting with the Phanerozoic where the focus is CO2. As with the other chapters, an initial introduction gives way to graded exercises starting with short-term cyclical change to the impacts of CO2 on temperatures. Forams are one of the key proxies in climate change; chapter 6 examines how they can be used and the limitations they have. Next, we have an examination not just of climate science but on the very notion of trying to get data in difficult areas. This is a diversion but an excellent one. If the book is to fulfil its aims of giving a real insight into climate science then it follows that it must look at the real practical difficulties involved. This is made even more important because many of the exercises are taken from Polar regions. The remaining chapters look at key events: Palaeocene-Eocene thermal Maximum, Glaciations and Antarctic records. One chapter discusses the Pliocene warm period – one seen as being most like today’s scenarios (and therefore an important case study.<\/p>\n

There\u00a0 is much to like in this text. Perhaps the most important is that it takes the student away from the text as a passive receiver and puts them into a more active situation where their decisions are needed. The inclusion of practical issues such as the problems of drilling and interpretation focus the student away from just getting an answer to understanding the limitations of the answer they came to. The use of real data and images means that readers get to see results in all their messiness rather than some contrived version just to prove a point. It’s an excellent text and a great addition to a field where this sort of material is rare. The only real issue to be had with this text is the focus on polar marine aspects and its more North American focus in terms of pedagogy. However, these do not detract from the value of the text to students of climate science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rating: Kristen St John, R Mark Leckie, Kate Pound, Megan Jones and Lawrence Krissek. 2012. Reconstructing Earth’s Climate History. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978 1 1182 3294 1 Over the years there have been hundreds (probably thousands!) of books published on just about every topic in the climate change canon. Rarely, there’s a book that looks at something from a completely new angle. One of the issues that has surrounded climate change from the beginning is that it often assumes that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[27,179,47,178,141],"class_list":["post-683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-science","tag-fieldwork","tag-palaeoclimatology","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":688,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions\/688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ecogeog.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}