Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Preamble: The killing of Gaia -- Contents -- 1 Rare Earth -- 2 Ancient Fires -- 3 Swarm Intelligence -- 4 Amazons and Misogynous Apes -- 5 River Empires and Divine Rulers -- 6 Human Sacrifice -- 7 On Slavery and Genocide -- 8 From Space Lunacy to Mad Max's Fury Road -- TV or not To Be -- 9 The Triumph of the Absurd -- 10 Burning the Lungs of Earth -- 11 I Am Shiva -- 12 The Swan Song -- 13 Eli's Lost World -- 13.1 King Brown -- 13.2 The Queen Ant -- 13.3 The Dingo -- Bibliography -- Peer Review Papers and Books -- Index.

Intro -- Foreword -- Prologue -- Contents -- About the Author -- 1 Introduction: From Homo Prometheus to Terra Incognita -- 2 Greenhouse Gases and Mass Extinctions -- 2.1 The K-T Impact-Triggered Hyperthermal Event -- 2.2 The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) -- 2.3 Cenozoic Climates -- 3 Human Origins (Abbreviated from Groves 2016) -- 4 Fire and Human Intelligence -- 5 The Age of Consequences -- 5.1 The Anthropocoene Hyperthermal -- 5.2 Accelerated Melting of the Ice Sheets -- 5.3 Migration of Climate Zones -- 5.4 Climate Extremes -- 5.5 An Uncharted Climate Territory -- 6 Inferno -- 7 The Gathering Storm -- 8 The Critical Century -- 9 An Orwellian Climate as Rome Burns -- 10 Space Lunacy -- 11 Notes from a Catastrophe -- 12 A Eulogy -- References -- Index.

1. The demise of the Holocene biosphere -- 2. The breach in the earth's radiation shield -- 3. The event horizon -- 4. A republic of insects and grasses -- 5. Homo prometheus -- 6. Darwinian evolution, intelligent purpose and mass extinctions of species -- Epilogue: The universal web

The book outlines principal milestones in the evolution of the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere during the last 4 million years in relation with the evolution from primates to the genus Homo - which uniquely mastered the ignition and transfer of fire. The advent of land plants since about 420 million years ago ensued in flammable carbon-rich biosphere interfaced with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Born on a flammable Earth surface, under increasingly unstable climates descending from the warmer Pliocene into the deepest ice ages of the Pleistocene, human survival depended on both-biological adaptations and cultural evolution, mastering fire as a necessity. This allowed the genus to increase entropy in nature by orders of magnitude. Gathered around camp fires during long nights for hundreds of thousandth of years, captivated by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, humans developed imagination, insights, cravings, fears, premonitions of death and thereby aspiration for immortality, omniscience, omnipotence and the concept of god. Inherent in pantheism was the reverence of the Earth, its rocks and its living creatures, contrasted by the subsequent rise of monotheistic sky-god creeds which regard Earth as but a corridor to heaven. Once the climate stabilized in the early Holocene, since about -7000 years-ago production of excess food by Neolithic civilization along the Great River Valleys has allowed human imagination and dreams to express themselves through the construction of monuments to immortality. Further to burning large part of the forests, the discovery of combustion and exhumation of carbon from the Earth's hundreds of millions of years-old fossil biospheres set the stage for an anthropogenic oxidation event, affecting an abrupt shift in state of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system. The consequent ongoing extinction equals the past five great mass extinctions of species-constituting a geological event horizon in the history of planet Earth. Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate Scientist, Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Research School of Earth Science, the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Planetary Science Institute, and a member of the ANU Climate Change Institute.