) are alteringthe cycles of matter and life and interfering with the Earth’s natural coolingprocess. Melting Arctic ice and mountain glaciers are just the first relatively mildsymptoms of what will result from this disruption of the planetary energy balance.In

Rising

, scientist Tyler Volk explains the process at the heart of global warming and climate change: the global carbon cycle. Vividly and concisely,Volk describes what happens when CO

is released by the combustion of fossilfuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), letting loose carbon atoms once trapped deepunderground into the interwoven web of air, water, and soil. To demonstrate how the carbon cycle works, Volk traces the paths that carbonatoms take during their global circuits. Showing us the carbon cycle from a carbonatom’s viewpoint, he follows one carbon atom into a leaf of barley and then intoan alcohol molecule in a glass of beer, through the human bloodstream, andthenback into the air. He also compares the fluxes of carbon brought intothe biosphere naturally to those created by the combustion of fossil fuels andexplains why the latter are responsible for rising temperatures.Knowledge about the global carbon cycleand the huge disturbances that human activity produces in it will equip us to consider thehard questions Volk raises in the second half of

Rising

: projections of future levels of CO

; which energy systems and processes(solar, wind, nuclear, carbon sequestration?) will power civilization in the future; therelationships among the wealth of nations,energy use, and CO

emissions; and globalequity in per capita emissions. Answeringthese questions will indeed be our greatestenvironmental challenge.

Tyler Volk is Science Director of EnvironmentalStudies and Associate Professor of Biology at New York University. He is the author of

Gaia’s Body:Toward a Physiology of the Earth

(MIT Press),

Metapatterns: Across Space, Time, and Mind

, andother books.An introduction to the globalcarbon cycle and the human-causeddisturbances to it that are at theheart of global warmingand climate change.

October5 3/8 x 8, 264 pp.38 illus.

$22.95T/£14.95 cloth

978-0-262-22083-5

Also available

GAIA’S BODYToward a Physiologyof the Earth

Tyler Volk2003, 978-0-262-72042-7$22.00T/£14.95

science/environment