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| Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future | 
| Author: Peter D. Ward
Publisher: Collins
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $8.27
You Save: $18.68 (69%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  34 reviews
Sales Rank: 568102
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.1
Dewey Decimal Number: 577.276
ASIN: B0012FBA92
Publication Date: April 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new! Beautiful! May have a small remainder mark (ink mark) along the edge. gift quality, crisp, clean, multiple copies available, prompt shipping, excellent service.
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Product Description
By looking backward at the course of great extinctions, a paleontologist sees what the future holds. More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90 percent of all species and nearly 97 percent of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists. During the 1990s and the early part of this century, a great battle was fought between those who thought that death had come from above and those who thought something more complicated was at work. Paleontologist Peter. D. Ward, fresh from helping prove that an asteroid had killed the dinosaurs, turned to the Permian problem, and he has come to a stunning conclusion. In his investigations of the fates of several groups of mollusks during that extinction and others, he discovered that the near-total devastation at the end of the Permian period was caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide leading to climate change. But it's not the heat (nor the humidity) that's directly responsible for the extinctions, and the story of the discovery of what is responsible makes for a fascinating, globe-spanning adventure. In Under a Green Sky, Ward explains how the Permian extinction as well as four others happened, and describes the freakish oceans—belching poisonous gas—and sky—slightly green and always hazy—that would have attended them. Those ancient upheavals demonstrate that the threat of climate change cannot be ignored, lest the world's life today—ourselves included—face the same dire fate that has overwhelmed our planet several times before.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 29 more reviews...
 Green Sky - Gold Stars (For Ward) November 25, 2008
If you aren't a scientist, find science absolutely fascinating, and are often turned off by the writing style of the typical scientist/writer, then this book is for you and me.
I delayed reading this book since I heard about it when it first came out. I've read about 10 science-related books in that time. Boy, did I blow it. This should have been the first on my "To Read" list.
Ward's topic is incredibly interesting/scary (as many other longer reviews here will tell you). But, what I want to emphasize here is - this is GREAT WRITING.
To me, it read like a novel, and I tore it up! And not some "hack writer with a good story" type fiction. Really well written with some sentences and paragraphs that a top author would be proud to have crafted.
The fact that it is an informative and jaw-dropping science book, in this case, is just a bonus! Do yourself a favor and read this.
The Long View of the Earth's Climate and Atmosphere November 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Under A Green Sky is a very short hypothetical book pushing the connections between the Earth's atmospheric composition and planetary climate, it's the long view, and it deeply connects with life's manifestations over geologic time. We may be preoccupied with asteroid impacts and the violent end of the era of dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, but far more insidious and subtle factors played havoc in prior extinctions. These more profound earlier extinctions and may well be harbingers of our future. The book is well written and documented, and posits many connections between the life forms we know and their evolution over time. Ward melds many bits of evidence and data into a coherent and scary theory that should give us all pause.
 Read this book and you might have an epiphany... October 11, 2008
Even though I knew many of those facts before, it was really while reading this book that I realized that the image of the world that has been hard wired in us by culture, religion and the arrogant ignorance of the main stream scientific community (*) is totally invalid.
This book will get you to realize that the Earth has not been a benevolent "creation" if only for short periods of time (the past 10,000 years is one of them) and that we are not the "designated" heirs of this place but we are the temporary passengers who along with all the rest of our familiar surroundings are destined to vanish the way some 99% of ALL the creatures that ever roamed this earth (some for millions of years) have.
This might happen pretty far in the future (1000 years?) or may be not so far: read the conclusion with the different possible scripts for the human drama to unfold. Thanks to technology Humans will most likely survive for a pretty long time but our communities will look like nothing we know today!
The Industrial revolution only made us realize faster that our fate on this planet was not as rosy as we were lead to believe... It is just a matter of time...
(*) If we have made many important discoveries there is much we don't know. Yet scientists of their time have always insisted on the absolute truth of their statements only to have it turned on its head by the next generation of scientits and so on....
A must read. August 1, 2008
This is a very well written book about very difficult subject matter. Ward takes you on his own scientific journey which led him to startling and terrifying conclusions about human kind's present course. As a physician and former scientist I would say the science seems solid. He weaves a cogent, highly interesting tale about the history of climate change and how it brought about the horrific mass extinctions in our geologic near past. There is tangible mayhem in these past apocalypses, and the author does a vivid job of relating it to the reader in an easy to understand manner. Underlying the seam of these apocalypses is the dark realization that humans have placed the earth on a course we might not easily be able to change (if at all). And future generations might very well know the mechanism of their doom, and they would certainly know that we are the ones who doomed them.
I would have liked to have seen a bit more detail in the scientific analytic processes, but too much detail might have taken this book away from its intended audience. Its intended audience is anyone who will listen to reason and cares about their children. This is a must read. It is possible that it is the most important subject matter ever written in a book.
Global Warming: Lots of Conflicting Data & No Easy Answers July 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In UNDER A GREEN SKY, Peter Ward approaches global warming from the interesting perspective of historical geology and paleontology. Ward notes that when many scientists and the general public discuss global warming and its repercussions for humanity, they tend to place it in the context of CO2 emissions and a general increase in temperature. Ward takes this discussion and extends it to the various mass extinctions that have plagued the earth over the last few hundred million years. The biggest and baddest extinction of all time was undoubtedly the one that struck at the end of the Permian, roughly 230 million years ago. Scientists now think that more than 90 percent of all life, both on land and in the seas, was extinguished. Ward focuses on the various causes of that extinction and on the one that wiped out the dinosaurs at the close of the Cenozioc some 65 million years ago. He notes some commonalities. It is true that a colossal asteroid struck the earth in the latter case, but he notes that in the Permian extinction and to a lesser extent in the Cenozoic was a witches' brew of global warming, a belching forth of volcanic noxious gases, the slowing down and ultimate cessation of the Atlantic Ocean conveyer belt of warm currents from the Equator, and most devastating of all, a change in the chemistry of the oceans themselves from oxygen bearing to anaerobic oxygen depletion. Ward considers a dreadful confluence of events that begins with global warming and leads to a sky that is tinged with a permanent green, hence the title. At this point, it is too late for any surviving species to do no more than to try to burrow into whatever miserable ground hole they can find.
What makes UNDER A GREEN SKY so powerful is Ward's ability to yank the modern reader from the comfortable world of today and metaphorically transport him back to a number of past aeons where the sky was more green than blue. As that reader treads the very earth that is choking under a vicious cloud of suffocating fumes, he will surely ponder whether history will repeat itself yet one more time even as supposedly intelligent species like us can foresee such crises yet refuse to derail them. UNDER A GREEN SKY is the book of the decade.
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