Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-169) and index

Introduction: It's a Matter of Scale -- 1. The Organic and Nonliving Earth: A Dynamic Cohesion -- 2. The Coevolution of Climate and Life -- 3. What Causes Climate Change? -- 4. Modeling Human-Induced Global Climate Change -- 5. Biodiversity and the Battle of the Birds -- 6. Integrated Assessments of Policy Options

Schneider traces our climatic history not only from the beginning and up to the twentieth century, but deep into the twenty-first as well. He depicts the next one hundred years as a potentially perilous period for climate and life - unless we citizens of Earth first recognize and then work to control the unintended global scale experiment we are foisting on ourselves and all other life on "Laboratory Earth." This "lab" is not built of glass, wires, and tubes, but of

insects, soils, air, oceans, birds, trees, and people. While no honest scientist can claim to have clairvoyant vision into the twenty-first century, Schneider optimistically demonstrates that enough is already known to command our attention and to insure that the juggernaut of human impacts on Earth doesn't turn into a gamble we can't afford to lose

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