Ice Time is out of print.  It can be bought via Amazon’s marketplace and in a wide range of used bookstores on and offline.

Ice Time: Climate, Science, and Life on Earth

Harper and Row, 1989

Ice Time came out in the midst of the first significant scientific realization about the risks and probabilities of human-induced climate change.  In my book I set out to do more than simply report on that emerging understanding.  I wanted to show how the study of climate itself had undergone a revolution, and thus why predictions about rapid climate change should be taken seriously.  To that end, the first half of the book describes how modern investigators discovered the ways climate works, from the billion-year-scale over which the Earth’s atmosphere evolved to the minute-by-minute wisps of daily weather.  The book then looks at the way climate researchers make their discoveries, and why this branch of science can be understood to have revolutionized itself:  it found new ways to observe the climate, from satellite measurements to the analysis of ancient air trapped in Greenland’s ice cap; and it seized on breakthroughs in computers to develop new and uniquely powerful mathematical models of the Earth as a whole.  Put those two kinds of tools together, and you get a discipline that can make predictions about human-climate interaction.  The last section of the book looks at those:  not just global warming, though that’s a big part of the story, but other ways in which human actions change the conditions in which all life on earth exists.

The most significant fact about Ice Time is that, despite the fact that it’s almost three decades old now, none of the science in it has been superceded.  Our tools have gotten better; we’ve dramatically increased precision and resolution of our knowledge of the climate system and its vulnerabilities.  But the basic story hasn’t changed, and no part of Ice Time’s account of how we learn what we now know is wrong.  In other words:  we’ve had the scientific chops to understand—and confront—the human impact on climate for a long time.  The book is thus in some sense a historical document, a fine and pretty fast read that brings into sharp relief a blunt fact of recent decades:  politics trumps science, to an ultimate high cost for both.  At the time, The Boston Globe called the book “entertaining, informative, and very civilized…a useful guide to Armageddon,” while The Los Angeles Times wrote that “Levenson excels at translating complex problems into terms that the general reader can easily understand.”

Purchase

Ice Time is out of print.  It can be bought via Amazon’s marketplace and in a wide range of used bookstores on and offline.