Climate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the
foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and
sea level continue to take place. But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams
reveal in The Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today
hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion
years.
Indeed, the vast history that the authors relate here is dramatic and often
abrupt--with massive changes in global and regional climate, from bitterly cold
to sweltering hot, from arid to humid. They introduce us to the Cryogenian
period, the days of Snowball