CO₂ rising

CO₂ rising

Tyler Volk 

Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2008 | Pp223 | £14.95 | ISBN 978 0 26 222083 5

Reviewed by William Bloss

In this book, Tyler Volk tackles the familiar topic of the greenhouse effect and climate change with a different focus. Aimed at the general reader with a modest scientific background, the first part of the book addresses the interlinked carbon cycling and fluxes between components of the biosphere - loosely, the atmosphere, oceans, soils and living organisms. This leads to the thorny issue of what fraction of emitted CO₂ remains in the atmosphere, and over what timescales equilibria are established between the different reservoirs - a crucial issue overlooked in many simple accounts of climate change.