Climatic Changes: Their Nature and Causes

Although the problems of this book may lead far afield, they ultimately bring us back to the earth and to the present. Several times in the preceding pages there has been mentio...

We are now prepared to consider the climate of the past. The first period to claim attention is the few thousand years covered by written history. Strangely enough, the conditio...

The major portion of this book has been concerned with the explanation of the more abrupt and extreme changes of climate. This chapter and the next consider two other sorts of c...

Having outlined in general terms the coming of the ice sheets and their disappearance, we are now ready to discuss certain problems of compelling climatic interest. The discussi...

In discussions of climate, as of most subjects, a peculiar psychological phenomenon is observable. Everyone sees the necessity of explaining conditions different from those that...

described. At that time sunspots are known to have been unusually numerous, and there were great climatic extremes. Lakes overflowed in Central Asia; storms, droughts, floods, a...

Having discussed the climatic effect of movements of the earth's crust during the course of geological time, we are now ready to consider the corresponding effects due to change...

The remarkable phenomena of glacial periods afford perhaps the best available test to which any climatic hypothesis can be subjected. In this chapter and the two that follow, we...

The next step in our study of climate is to review the main hypotheses as to the causes of glaciation. These hypotheses apply also to other types of climatic changes. We shall c...

The variability of the earth's climate is almost as extraordinary as its uniformity. This variability is made up partly of a long, slow tendency in one direction and partly of i...

The rôle of climate in the life of today suggests its importance in the past and in the future. No human being can escape from the fact that his food, clothing, shelter, recreat...

for example, prove that since the final disappearance of the continental ice cap at the close of the Wisconsin there has been at least one period when the climate of Europe was...

In order to give concreteness to our picture of the climatic pulsations of historic times let us take a specific period and see how its changes of climate were distributed over...

One of the most remarkable formations associated with glacial deposits consists of vast sheets of the fine-grained, yellowish, wind-blown material called loess. Somewhat peculia...

The progress of science is made up of a vast succession of hypotheses. The majority die in early infancy. A few live and are for a time widely accepted. Then some new hypothesis...

An interesting practical application of some of the preceding generalizations is found in an attempt by C. E. P. Brooks[95] to interpret post-glacial climatic changes almost ent...

a-b. None definitely determined during Mesozoic, although there appears to have been periods of cooling (a) in the late Triassic, and (b) in the late Cretacic, with at least loc...

If solar activity is really an important factor in causing climatic changes, it behooves us to subject the sun to the same kind of inquiry to which we have subjected the earth....

Having gained some idea of the nature of the electrical hypothesis of solar disturbances and of the possible effect of other bodies upon the sun's atmosphere, let us now compare...