The product of a unique collaboration between a pioneering earth scientist and an award-winning science writer, Fixing Climate takes an unconventional approach to the problem of global warming—and offers a possible solution. Hailed by his colleagues as “one of the our greatest living geoscientists,” Wallace S. Broecker, a longtime researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, warned about the possible consequences of global warming decades before it became a compelling public issue. Hooked on climate studies since his student days, he has learned, largely through his own findings, that climate does change—naturally, dramatically, and rarely benignly. He also knows from experience that when mankind pushes nature as we are currently doing by dumping some sixty to seventy million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day, climate will change even more dramatically and less benignly. As Broecker points out, if a well-meaning fairy godmother were to turn us all into energy-saving paragons at the stroke of midnight tonight, the resulting reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide might lessen but could not turn aside the great warming tide now headed our way. There is, nonetheless, a glimmer of hope in the development of new technologies that are directed not only at the reduction of carbon dioxide output but also at its harmless disposal.

Wallace S. Broecker is the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He has received many honors for his work, most recently the 2006 Crafoord Prize in Geosciences. Robert Kunzig is a freelance science writer.