UNDER A GREEN SKY

Reviewed 5/07/2010

Under a Green Sky, by Peter D. Ward

UNDER A GREEN SKY
Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future
Peter D. Ward
David W. Ehlert (Illus.)
New York: Smithsonian/HarperCollins, April 2007

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN 0-06-113791-X 242pp. HC/GSI $26.95

Errata

Page x: "We rocket out of the parking lot, screaming through Reno on the freeway east, passing quickly into the empty rat lands of the sorely missed Hunter S. Thompson, tripping out at the absolute ugliness of a landscape repellant to begin with that has twisted, rusting metal hulks of unknown ancestry sprinkled among the itinerant whorehouses and casinos in a random pattern across its waterless salt flats and outcrops."
  Spelling: S/B "repellent".
Page xiii: "In this book I will marshall the history of discovery, beginning in the 1970s, that has led an increasing number of scientists across of broad swath of fields to conclude that the past might be our best key to predicting the future."
  Wrong word: S/B "across a broad swath".
Pages 2-3: "...an attempt to understand how the long-extinct ammonite cephalopods could, after a wildly successful existence on Earth of more than 360 million years, would have gone extinct..."
  Duplicate verbs: S/B "have gone extinct".
Pages 6-7: "Specialists showed that the fossil records of foraminifera and coccolithophorids showed the predicted pattern of sudden extinction. But because no larger fossils—such as the all-important ammonites—existed in these rocks, the major question as to whether the impact, if it happened at all, had killed off the more celebrated of the larger marine animals, from ammonites to clams to fish, to the largest marine reptiles such as mosasaurs—let alone the most iconic Cretaceous inhabitants—the terrestrial dinosaurs—could be answered only through the study of other sections."
  Too many M-dashes: S/B "the most iconic Cretaceous inhabitants, the terrestrial dinosaurs".
Page 8: "...as a consequence of the tectonic formation of the Pyrénéenes mountain chain and now rakishly tilted skyward."
  Spelling: S/B "Pyrénees".
Page 8: "...as a consequence of the tectonic formation of the Pyrénees mountain chain and now rakishly tilted skyward."
  Word order: S/B "tilted rakishly skyward".
Page 9: "...and that lightness came from the skeletons of untold numbers of calcereous skeletons that had been secreted by microscopic, floating algae..."
  Unneeded words.
Page 21: "The Alvarezes proposed that neither of these were right."
  Number: S/B "was".
Page 27: "A second giant flood basalt [...] was named the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, and its age—202 million to 199 million years—again closely corresponds with the Triassic mass extinction of 2,000 million years ago."
  No, actually it does not correspond.
Page 31: "...some 15 miles up the coast from the Hendaye and some 60 ,miles north of Zumaya."
  "The Hendaye" or just Hendaye"? (See page 33.)
Page 42: "...the pinnacle being elections into the National Academy of Sciences, a fixed-membership club..."
  Number: S/B "election". And, "fixed-membership"? If this is supposd to mean the number of NAS members does not increase, it is inaccurate.
Page 47: "But did anything else on Earth feel this event, or was it entirely restricted to the deep sea? To do that, paleontologists needed to better understand..."
  Wording: S/B "to discover that," or "to find out,".
Page 48: "By plotting the first and last occurrences, a table of ranges and occurrences was produced ..."
  This seems clumsy to me.
Page 53: "...and a consequence of this heightened number of explosive eruptions, as well as the more gentle eruptions, of flood basalts was a vast increase..."
  Misplaced comma: S/B "the more gentle eruptions of flood basalts,".
Page 73: "...but this was really bad science, and since they could neither confirm that the large structure, detected remotely using gravity anomaly measurements [...], and most important, since they could not reach any of the buried rock, they had no way of knowing what age their 'crater' was."
  The "neither" is there, but the "nor" is missing. I have no idea what this should be. It looks like an incomplete revision.
Page 74: "...these same scientists would most certainly have compared notes on the purported Becker discovery, if discovery it was."
  Redundant: S/B "discovery."
Page 82: "At the same time, one of the greatest episodes of volcanism known in Earth's history took place..."
  This paragraph started out talking about two time periods.
Page 82: "The mechanism touted by the authors was akin to the horrific catastrophe that occurred in the 1980s at Lake Cameroon, in Niger, Africa."
  This tragic release of CO2 took place in 1986 at Lake Nyos in Cameroon.
Page 110: "...we congratulated ourselves in the local bar afterward, drinking the only beer then available, Old Milwaukee."
  Product placement, perhaps? Not with that disparaging lead-in. ("Now, have you all got your Longine's dive watches?" might work.)
Page 121: "Those organisms had already been teetering on the edge of extinction by the highly acidic seawater of the time..."
  Missing word: S/B "had been set teetering".
Page 121: "The tax base on the island, with its numerous waterfront and water-view houses is enormous, and why not— the view is sublime..."
  Misplaced comma, missing period and capital "A": S/B "houses, is enormous. And why not—".
Page 131: "You cross the great expanse of South Africa and its Great Karoo Desert, and then the far drier Kalihari..."
  Is it "Great Karoo" or just "Karoo" as earlier in the book?
Page 132: "...they drop their cobbles onto the deep ocean below, ..."
  Wording: S/B "onto the ocean floor deep below,".
Page 136: "The carbon dioxide makes pretty clear that..."
  Missing word: S/B "makes it pretty clear".
Page 143: "From the initiation of that interval to the present period is one of the groups, while the other group studies..."
  Missing words: S/B "is the subject of one of the groups".
Page 147: "The ice-core records and other sources of climate information, such as deep-sea paleontological and isotopic records indicate that over the past 800,000 years..."
  Missing comma: S/B "records, indicate".
Page 150: "To gather his data, he laboriously counted the number and kinds of benthic foraminifera found in sediment, which leave behind their microscopic shells after their death."
  Rewrite.
Page 150: "Bond observed that after a particularly large warming event—the next three, four, or even five Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles—showed a progressively dropping mean temperature in similar areas of the cold part of the cycles."
  Missing word? or just incorrect punctuation?
Page 150: "With each cycle the subsequent rapid warmth was less than the same event of the proceeding cycle."
  S/B "rapid warming".
Page 151: "While such material does on occasion reach the deeper sea through underwater landslides caused by turbidity currents or grain flows, the very large number..."
  Undefined technical terms.
Page 152: "The easiest way to cause this change [...] is to pump in fresh water into the northern part of the system."
  Extra word: S/B "pump fresh water into".
Page 157: "...atop the gigantic Mauna Loa volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii."
  Change to lower case?
Page 160: "Ten thousand years ago, humans began to shift from hunter gathering to farming..."
  Rewrite: S/B "hunting and gathering". (But, if hunters are to be gathered, I'll opt for Rachel.)
Page 162: "Even with the first rudimentary agriculture, it took another 1,500 years—up to 10,500 years ago— for the first permanent villages to appear..."
  Since Ward assigned 8,000 years before present as the starting point, this is going in the wrong direction. S/B "6,500 years".
Page 165: "The activity of these gases directly kill by carbon dioxide or methane toxicity, or by producing a by-product effect of their rising levels in the atmosphere: global heating."
  These chapters were written in haste.
Page 166: "We measure the concentration of these hydrogen ion levels using the so-called pH scale..."
  Extra word: S/B "hydrogen ions". The following explanation should be tightened up.
Page 167: "Our world is hurtling toward carbon dioxide levels not seen since the Eocene epoch of 60 million years ago, which, important enough, occurred right after a greenhouse extinction."
  Usage: S/B "importantly enough".
Page 169: "It also sits among stunning green hills rising out of the cold, clear waters of Puget Sound."
  Are they stunning because they are green, or because they are hills?
Page 169: "Most of its trees are scrubby, deciduous maples and alder, with..."
  Is it maples and alder, or maple and alders?
Page 170: "Chuckanut Drive is a beautiful, windy road leading southward from Bellingham..."
  This road — is it windy or windy? I mean is it full of twists and turns, or subject to sudden gusts of wind? "Chuckanut Drive is a heavenly highway. Better highway a millionaire's money can't buy!" (A sudden gust of writeritis! Riffing on the old Chock Full O'Nuts jingle.)
Page 170: "...the fossils show exotic and exuberant leaf shapes..."
  Exuberant leaf shapes? That's... irrational.
Page 171: "A long jet-plane hour east of Australia lays the island of New Caledonia."
  "Ten thousand leagues [across] the sea it lays, or lies—I'm not too sure..." – The Beatles, Yellow Submarine. Here' "lies" is the verb to use.
Page 172: "New Caledonia became a slice of metal ore, eroding to deepest red in color when eroded to soil."
  S/B "turning deep red".
Page 174: "...what a world with carbone dioxide levels of 1,000 parts per million will be like."
  Spelling: S/B "carbon dioxide".
Page 174: "And besides, the summer of Florida and every other hot but industrialized place keeps the heat at bay..."
  Missing word: S/B "summer population of Florida". Java has kava and lava.
Page 178: "But perhaps the rate of change is faster than one can hope, fast enough, perhaps, to have taken our world past the combined climate tipping point."
  I don't think the highlighted phrase means what you think it means.
Page 178: "Ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica hold 20 percent of all the fresh water on our planet..."
  This is too low. And on page 186, Ward says Antarctica alone holds 70% of the world's fresh water.
Page 179: "But if either part of the Antarctic (western part) or all of the Greenland ice sheet melts..."
  S/B "(western or eastern part)".
Page 182: "Currently, Bangladesh is home to 112,000 people on 134,000 square acres of land."
  If this is supposed to be the total population of Bangladesh, it's impossibly small. Ward on page 183 says it is at least 200 million. If it's some subgroup of the total, he fails to specify which. And 134,000 "square acres" doesn't sound like very much. In fact, the CIA World Factbook says Bangladesh has an area of 143,998 square kilometers and a population (July 2009 estimate) of 156,050,883.1 So I sort of see where the book's land area came from, but this is very sloppy work — by somebody.
Pages 185-6: "But enough will disappear to certainly have an affect on sea level."
  S/B "have an effect".
Page 190: "Nations are unlikely to sit around and watch their populations starve or their national treasuries deplete in order to buy enough food."
  "Deplete" is a transitive verb; it needs an object. I suggest "drain away" as a substitute.
Page 198: "Rachel Carson, in her masterful book The Silent Spring, most famously alerted the world to the dangers of this chemical."
  Extra word: S/B "Silent Spring".
1 Land area is 130,138 and water 13,830, per the Factbook. Meanwhile, Wikipedia gives population from 142 to 159 million, depending on source.
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