Last week, I finished reading Curt Stager's amazing book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth . It was a book that is certainly worth reading, but at first glance one might ask what good is a book like this, one that purports to look far into the future beyond not only our own lifetimes but those even of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren (and many generations beyond that too). Of course, none of us will be here to witness whether Stager's predictions are true, but we can be assured that they are not blind prognostications. Stager is a paleoclimatologist by trade, meaning he looks to the record of rocks, ice and lake-bottom deposits to determine what past climates were like, using this information to help us understand what might be coming based on our actions in the present. This book is one of evidence-based reasoning presenting a range of possibilities for our future on this planet, based on whether we take a moderate-emissions path or a high-emissions...
Occasional author. Lover of coffee.