Most important book since "Inconvenient Truth"

[greenman3610]

http://www.amazon.com/Under-Green-Sky-Warming-Extinctions/dp/006113791X

I am an Al Gore presenter, and have been reading a LOT of material on climate and
global change, but this weekend I finished a book in one sitting that just
floored me.
This author is an astrobiologist for NASA, and has written for
Scientific American, among others.
His thesis is that although asteroid impact is an accepted cause for
the Cretaceous (dinosaur) extinction, that model does not fit for
many of the other half dozen or so major extinction events in
history, including the mother of them all, the Permian.(90 percent
of life killed off 250 million years ago)
He has developed very well documented arguments in favor
of a greenhouse based mechanism for the other
extinctions, and demonstrates that this is an emerging
paradigm in the paleoclimatological community.
If true, this is terrifying.
I wrote to the author, and he tells me, that he can't get the
book reviewed anywhere.

[Lisa]

1. I've been hearing that about the Permian too ...

We already know about some possible positive feedback loops (like methane clathrates, etc.). Wish we had ice core records going back that far (ironic if GHG were the very reason why we don't ...)

I'm trying to read up on this stuff too -- I'm teaching a global warming policy response course in the spring (e.g. using the Pacala wedge diagram Gore shows in the movie, and following it up from there). Thanks for the heads-up!