| Summary: | Abstract This book is about the effects of climate change on planet Earth’s icy parts. The melting of ice will both raise sea level and warm the climate further by reducing the white surfaces that reflect solar energy back into space. The book sets out carbon dioxide’s role as the control knob of our climate over the past 1,000 million years, then explores what is happening to ice and snow in Antarctica, the Arctic, and the high mountains. Fluctuations in carbon dioxide over the past million years were aided by slow changes in the Earth’s orbit and the tilt of the Earth’s axis, which created switches between glacial times when ice sheets covered northernmost Europe and North America, and brief warm interglacial periods like that of the past 12,000 years during which human civilization developed. Those controls then cooled our climate into a “neoglacial” period during which glaciers advanced everywhere, culminating in the Little Ice Age of 1400–1850. Our increasing emissions of greenhouse gases helped to move our climate out of the Little Ice Age. More than 90% of all the fossil fuel ever burned has been burned since 1950, creating a rupture with the previous climate system, taking us into a new climate regime, that of the Anthropocene. While the increase in global temperature since 1900 seems low at 1.2°C, it is double that in the polar regions where ice is melting. To regain ice we must get off the fossil fuel train now and return to the CO2 concentrations of about 1930.
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