The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels
The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels
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Publisher's Hardcover ©2013--
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Bloomsbury
Annotation: A history of climate change describes the dramatic evolution and stabilization of the oceans before the rise of humans approximately 6,000 years ago, tracing a significant rise in global temperatures since 1860 and how a rising sea level is affecting world populations.
 
Reviews: 3
Catalog Number: #95779
Format: Publisher's Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Copyright Date: 2013
Edition Date: 2013 Release Date: 06/11/13
Pages: xxii, 265 pages
ISBN: 1-608-19692-5
ISBN 13: 978-1-608-19692-0
Dewey: 551.45
LCCN: 2012043454
Dimensions: 25 cm.
Language: English
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews

Fagan (Emeritus, Anthropology; Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans, 2012, etc.) provides his assessment of rising sea levels. The author believes that man has about 50 years to change his ways and either adopt a long-term commitment to investing in the engineering skills and projects that can provide protection against the rise of the seas or relocate tens of millions of threatened people to higher ground. Fagan reviews both the long-term effect of very small annual rises and the more immediately disastrous results of tsunamis, hurricanes and typhoons. He shows how, at the end of the last Ice Age, when water levels were more than 400 feet below where they are now, a gradual rise accompanied the warming trend over more than 4,000 years. These effects, as well as his imaginative reconstructions of their consequences on the human communities of the time--e.g., Doggerland in the English Channel--provide a standpoint from which to consider the warming trend and ocean rise that began to set in again since the Industrial Revolution. Fagan draws on evidence from geology, archaeology and anthropology to support his case. The Netherlands, with their historical record of land reclamation and fortification against the seas, provides an example of the longer-term policy shift and commitment that needs to be made globally. These are multigenerational commitments that require continual upgrading, maintenance and the practical understanding that long-term physical processes are under way that won't be reversed by adopting carbon taxes and lowering fuel consumption--measures that are necessary but insufficient. The author's vision and knowledge substantiate his clearly expressed concerns.

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Bibliography Index/Note: Includes bibliographical references (pages [241]-255) and index.
Reading Level: 9.0
Interest Level: 9+

The past fifteen thousand years--the entire span of human civilization--have witnessed dramatic sea level changes, which began with rapid global warming at the end of the Ice Age, when sea levels were more than 700 feet below modern levels. Over the next eleven millennia, the oceans climbed in fits and starts. These rapid changes had little effect on those humans who experienced them, partly because there were so few people on earth, and also because they were able to adjust readily to new coastlines. Global sea levels stabilized about six thousand years ago except for local adjustments that caused often quite significant changes to places like the Nile Delta. So the curve of inexorably rising seas flattened out as urban civilizations developed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and South Asia. The earth's population boomed, quintupling from the time of Christ to the Industrial Revolution. The threat from the oceans increased with our crowding along shores to live, fish, and trade. Since 1860, the world has warmed significantly and the ocean's climb has speeded. The sea level changes are cumulative and gradual; no one knows when they will end. The Attacking Ocean , from celebrated author Brian Fagan, tells a tale of the rising complexity of the relationship between humans and the sea at their doorsteps, a complexity created not by the oceans, which have changed but little. What has changed is us, and the number of us on earth.


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