Deep Future The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth [Paperback]

AKirkus ReviewsBest Nonfiction of 2011 title

A bold, far-reaching look at how our actions will decide the planet's future for millennia to come.

Imagine a planet where North American and Eurasian navies are squaring off over shipping lanes through an acidified, ice-free Arctic. Centuries later, their northern descendants retreat southward as the recovering sea freezes over again. And later still, future nations plan how to avert an approaching Ice Age... by burning what remains of our fossil fuels.

These are just a few of the events that are likely to befall Earth and human civilization in the next 100,000 years. And it will be the choices we make in this century that will affect that future more than those of any previous generation. We are living at the dawn of the Age of Humans; the only question is how long that age will last.

Few of us have yet asked, What happens after global warming? Drawing upon the latest, groundbreaking works of a handful of climate visionaries, Curt Stager'sDeep Futurehelps us look beyond 2100 a.d. to the next hundred millennia of life on Earth.

CURT STAGER is an ecologist, paleoclimatologist, and science writer with a Ph.D. in biology and geology from Duke University. He has published more than three dozen climate- and ecology-related articles in major journals includingScienceandQuaternary Research, and has written for popular audiences in periodicals such asNational Geographic. He teaches at Paul Smith's College in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and holds a research associate post at the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute, where he investigates the long-term history of climate in Africa, South America, and the polar regions.

Amid all the ranting, confusing, and contradicting books on climate change, at last here's one that does something truly useful: Clearly and engagingly, scientist Curt Stager guides us back into the atmosphere's historylã©