Download or read book The Carbon Age written by Eric Roston and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-08-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do bubbles in a soft drink, a bullet-proof vest, a plastic chair, and our DNA have in common? Carbon. It is, and forever has been, the ubiquitous architect of life and civilization, forming the chemical backbone of every living creature. And yet, when we hear the word today, it is more often than not in a crisis situation: carbon dioxide emissions are destroying the ozone layer and warming the planet; the volatile Middle East explodes atop its stores of hydrocarbons; carbohydrates threaten obesity and diabetics. Carbon, thus, sustains us and threatens us in equal measure, Eric Roston illuminates this essential element in all its forms, cleverly recreating the intricate carbon cycle on the page by tracing its journey from the Big Bang to Earth and its extraordinary infiltration of this planet and, in time, influence on humankind and civilization. Evoking its ubiquity-more than 99% of all 31 million known substances contain carbon-Roston chronicles the ways we have used it, often to surprising, and sometimes to catastrophic, effect: having sped up the carbon cycle in the last two centuries, we are now attempting to wrestle Earth's geochemical cycle back from the brink. Blending the latest science with original reporting, Roston makes us aware, as never before, of the seminal impact carbon has, and has had, on our lives.
Download or read book Carbon Age written by Eric Roston and published by . This book was released on 2011-08 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carbon has always been the ubiquitous architect and chemical scaffolding of life and civilization; all living things draw carbon from their environments to stay alive, and the great cycle by which carbon moves through organisms, ground, water, and atmosphere has long been a kind of global circulatory system that helps keep earth in balance. And yet ¿carbon¿ today often indicates crisis: carbon dioxide emissions have sped up the carbon cycle; chlorofluorocarbons are destroying the ozone layer and warming the planet; the Middle East explodes atop its stores of volatile hydrocarbons. Here, Roston chronicles the often surprising ways mankind has used it over centuries, and the growing catastrophe of the industrial era. Illustrations.
Download or read book Carbon Democracy written by Timothy Mitchell and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th century history—and of the political and environmental crises we now face.” —Guardian Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called “the economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.
Download or read book Hot Carbon written by John F. Marra and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are few fields of science that carbon-14 has not touched. A radioactive isotope of carbon, it stands out for its unusually long half-life. Best known for its application to estimating the age of artifacts—carbon dating—carbon-14 helped reveal new chronologies of human civilization and geological time. Everything containing carbon, the basis of all life, could be placed in time according to the clock of radioactive decay, with research applications ranging from archeology to oceanography to climatology. In Hot Carbon, John F. Marra tells the untold story of this scientific revolution. He weaves together the workings of the many disciplines that employ carbon-14 with gripping tales of the individuals who pioneered its possibilities. He describes the concrete applications of carbon-14 to the study of all the stuff of life on earth, from climate science’s understanding of change over time to his own work on oceanic photosynthesis with microscopic phytoplankton. Marra’s engaging narrative encompasses nuclear testing, the peopling of the Americas, elephant poaching, and the flax plants used for the linen in the Shroud of Turin. Combining colorful narrative prose with accessible explanations of fundamental science, Hot Carbon is a thought-provoking exploration of how the power of carbon-14 informs our relationship to the past.
Download or read book Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change written by Peter Calthorpe and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Synthetic Age written by Christopher J. Preston and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining a future in which humans fundamentally reshape the natural world using nanotechnology, synthetic biology, de-extinction, and climate engineering. We have all heard that there are no longer any places left on Earth untouched by humans. The significance of this goes beyond statistics documenting melting glaciers and shrinking species counts. It signals a new geological epoch. In The Synthetic Age, Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about this coming epoch is not only how much impact humans have had but, more important, how much deliberate shaping they will start to do. Emerging technologies promise to give us the power to take over some of Nature's most basic operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it is that we are leaving behind the time in which planetary change is just the unintended consequence of unbridled industrialism. A world designed by engineers and technicians means the birth of the planet's first Synthetic Age. Preston describes a range of technologies that will reconfigure Earth's very metabolism: nanotechnologies that can restructure natural forms of matter; “molecular manufacturing” that offers unlimited repurposing; synthetic biology's potential to build, not just read, a genome; “biological mini-machines” that can outdesign evolution; the relocation and resurrection of species; and climate engineering attempts to manage solar radiation by synthesizing a volcanic haze, cool surface temperatures by increasing the brightness of clouds, and remove carbon from the atmosphere with artificial trees that capture carbon from the breeze. What does it mean when humans shift from being caretakers of the Earth to being shapers of it? And in whom should we trust to decide the contours of our synthetic future? These questions are too important to be left to the engineers.
Download or read book The Carbon Diaries 2015 written by Saci Lloyd and published by Holiday House. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's the year 2015, and global warming is ravaging the environment. In response, the United Kingdom mandates carbon rationing. When her carbon debit card arrives in the mail, sixteen-year-old Laura is just trying to handle the pressure of exams, keep her straight-X punk band on track, and catch the attention of her gorgeous classmate Ravi. But as multiple natural disasters strike and Laura's parents head toward divorce, her world spirals out of control. With the highest-category hurricane in history heading straight toward London, chronicling the daily insanity is all Laura can do to stay grounded in a world where disaster is the norm.
Download or read book The Story of Carbon written by Mark Uehling and published by . This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the chemical element carbon: its forms, uses, and importance in our lives.
Download or read book The Human Age The World Shaped By Us written by Diane Ackerman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-09-10 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Prize. A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet. With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics…nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.
Download or read book Carbon Technocracy written by Victor Seow and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine. The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth. Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.
Download or read book The Carbon Elements written by Brian Belval and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2009-08-15 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Carbon elements consist of carbon, silicon, germanium, tin, and lead. This book illustrates the properties of each and how they're used in daily life, including in electronics, automotive parts, and medicine.
Download or read book The Many Lives of Carbon written by Dag Olav Hessen and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its pure form, carbon appears as the soft graphite of a pencil or as the sparkling diamond in a woman’s engagement ring. Underneath the surface, carbon is also the basic building block of the cells in our bodies and of all known life on earth. And at a molecular level, carbon bonds with oxygen to create carbon dioxide—a gas as vital to our life on this planet as it is detrimental at high levels in our atmosphere. As we face the climate change crisis, it’s now more important than ever to understand carbon and its life cycle. The Many Lives of Carbon is the story of this all-important chemical element, labeled C on our periodic tables. It’s the story of balance—between photosynthesis and cell respiration, between building and burning, between life and death. Dag Olav Hessen is our guide as we discover carbon in minerals, rocks, wood, and rain forests. He explains how carbon is studied by scientists, as well as its role in the greenhouse effect, and, not least, the impact of manmade emissions. Hessen isn’t afraid to ask the difficult questions as he confronts us with the literally burning issue of climate change. How will ecosystems respond to global change, and how will this feed back into our climate systems? How bad could climate change be, and will our ecosystems recover? What are our moral obligations in the face of excess carbon production? Neither alarmist nor moralistic, Hessen takes readers on a journey from atom to planet in informative, compelling prose.
Download or read book The Global Carbon Cycle written by David Archer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A must-have introduction to this fundamental driver of the climate system The Global Carbon Cycle is a short introduction to this essential geochemical driver of the Earth's climate system, written by one of the world's leading climate-science experts. In this one-of-a-kind primer, David Archer engages readers in clear and simple terms about the many ways the global carbon cycle is woven into our climate system. He begins with a concise overview of the subject, and then looks at the carbon cycle on three different time scales, describing how the cycle interacts with climate in very distinct ways in each. On million-year time scales, feedbacks in the carbon cycle stabilize Earth's climate and oxygen concentrations. Archer explains how on hundred-thousand-year glacial/interglacial time scales, the carbon cycle in the ocean amplifies climate change, and how, on the human time scale of decades, the carbon cycle has been dampening climate change by absorbing fossil-fuel carbon dioxide into the oceans and land biosphere. A central question of the book is whether the carbon cycle could once again act to amplify climate change in centuries to come, for example through melting permafrost peatlands and methane hydrates. The Global Carbon Cycle features a glossary of terms, suggestions for further reading, and explanations of equations, as well as a forward-looking discussion of open questions about the global carbon cycle.
Download or read book The Carbon Efficient City written by Al Hurd and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Carbon Efficient City shows how regional economies can be aligned with practices that drive carbon efficiency. It details ten strategies for reducing carbon emissions in our cities: standardized measurement, frameworks that support innovation, regulatory alignment, reducing consumption, reuse and restoration, focus on neighborhoods, providing spaces for nature, use of on-site life cycles for water and energy, coordination of regional transportation, and emphasis on solutions that delight people. Although climate change is recognized as an urgent concern, local and national governments, nonprofits, and private interests often work at cross purposes in attempting to address it. The Carbon Efficient City's focus on concrete, achievable measures that can be implemented in a market economy gives it broad appeal to professionals and engaged citizens across the political spectrum. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg3h0-fhYyA
Download or read book Carbon written by Kate Ervine and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carbon is the political challenge of our time. While critical to supporting life on Earth, too much carbon threatens to destroy life as we know it, with rising sea levels, crippling droughts, and catastrophic floods sounding the alarm on a future now upon us. How did we get here and what must be done? In this incisive book, Kate Ervine unravels carbon's distinct political economy, arguing that, to understand global warming and why it remains so difficult to address, we must go back to the origins of industrial capitalism and its swelling dependence on carbon-intensive fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – to grease the wheels of growth and profitability. Taking the reader from carbon dioxide as chemical compound abundant in nature to carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas, from the role of carbon in the rise of global capitalism to its role in reinforcing and expanding existing patterns of global inequality, and from carbon as object of environmental governance to carbon as tradable commodity, Ervine exposes emerging struggles to decarbonize our societies for what they are: battles over the very meaning of democracy and social and ecological justice.
Download or read book Radiocarbon and Climate Change written by Edward A.G. Schuur and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a useful guide for researchers in ecology and earth science interested in the use of accelerator mass spectrometry technology. The development of research in radiocarbon measurements offers an opportunity to address the human impact on global carbon cycling and climate change. Presenting radiocarbon theory, history, applications, and analytical techniques in one volume builds a broad outline of the field of radiocarbon and its emergent role in defining changes in the global carbon cycle and links to climate change. Each chapter presents both classic and cutting-edge studies from different disciplines involving radiocarbon and carbon cycling. The book also includes a chapter on the history and discovery of radiocarbon, and advances in radiocarbon measurement techniques and radiocarbon theory. Understanding human alteration of the global carbon cycle and the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and climate remains one of the foremost environmental problems at the interface of ecology and earth system science. Many people are familiar with the terms ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’, but fewer are able to articulate the science that support these hypotheses. This book addresses general questions such as: what is the link between the carbon cycle and climate change; what is the current evidence for the fate of carbon dioxide added by human activities to the atmosphere, and what has caused past changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide? How can the radiocarbon and stable isotopes of carbon combined with other tools be used for quantifying the human impact on the global carbon cycle?
Download or read book Earthmasters written by Clive Hamilton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVThis book goes to the heart of the unfolding reality of the twenty-first century: international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have all failed, and before the end of the century Earth is projected to be warmer than it has been for 15 million years. The question “can the crisis be avoided?” has been superseded by a more frightening one, “what can be done to prevent the devastation of the living world?” And the disturbing answer, now under wide discussion both within and outside the scientific community, is to seize control of the very climate of the Earth itself./divDIV /divDIVClive Hamilton begins by exploring the range of technologies now being developed in the field of geoengineering--the intentional, enduring, large-scale manipulation of Earth’s climate system. He lays out the arguments for and against climate engineering, and reveals the extent of vested interests linking researchers, venture capitalists, and corporations. He then examines what it means for human beings to be making plans to control the planet’s atmosphere, probes the uneasiness we feel with the notion of exercising technological mastery over nature, and challenges the ways we think about ourselves and our place in the natural world./div
