Climate Through the Ages

Abstract

Concise long-term forecasting is a thing of the future ! As, to some extent, the future of human experience can be planned and foreseen from the historical past, so should that of weather and climate, in the long-term sense, be predicted by the evidence provided from geological records.This revised edition of Dr. Brooks's book puts comprehensively and into an astonishingly short space most of what is a t present known of the geological record of climate, together with the latest theories concerning the evidence for historic climatic changes. Included, too, is the substance of most, if not all, the philosophies concerning the origin and causes of climatic change and of fluctuations of flood and drought, heat and cold.Among the many additions to the first edition of 1926 is the inclusion of Professor F. E. Zeuner's views on the timing and glacial history of the Qnaternary Ice Age. Zeuner adopts Milankovitch's theory of the changes in the obliquity of the ecliptic, that is the angle which the plane of the equator makes with the plane of the earth's orbit. The obliquity is regarded as having changed according to a mathematically calculated time-rhythm and Zeuner argues that this rhythm of obliquity corresponds to that of the ice advances and retreats in the Quaternary Ice Age. Dr. Brooks is at pains to stress that Zeuner realizes that this astronomical theory of how the oscillations were determind in no way explains this ice age aa a whole. The author does not neglect to discuss fully the earlier theory of changa in solar radiation which Sir George Simpson puts forward to explain these oscillations.Many of the factors which govern climatic changes through the ages are touched on and it seems probable that no single one by itself could possibly explain them. Short-and long-term changq may be due to different causes or a combination of two or three of them. Besides discussing causea and timing (he devotes an appendix to geological dating) of climatic changes and fluctuations, he gives a wealth of evidence, geological and palaeontological, geographical and oceanographical, and to this he adds an excellent summary of accumulated knowledge of climatic changes within historical times, that ie within the period commonly called the Post-Glacial. or Recent. These records are based on many written accounts of, for instance, great cold or floods aid other phenomena which are described or mentioned in literature ; but before the time of written annals, archaeology and tradition are largely relied upon as a source of information supported by cbngea in lake levels and the study of tree ringa and other physical phenomena.It is impossible to give even a brief review of thiR concentrated wealth of information upon a study which involves so much and so many sciences.This in itself is a testimony of the value of such a work to the student, he he meteorologically or geologically minded. It might be added that it is also R testimony to the writer's patience, memory and clear-headeclness-and, indeed to his life-long interest in the inter-...

Announcements

“…This deduction apparently contradicts Chu (1926) and Brooks (1949), who quotes Chu's figures for the dry and wet periods of China since 311 600 A.D. as paralleling major fluctuations in western Asia.…”

Charcoals, Sands, and Channel Decorated Pottery from Northern Rhodesia1

“…From A.D. 300-800 aeolian activity was again intensified. The minimum recorded low level of the Nile occurred between 700 and 1000 A.D. (Brooks 1926).…”

Birds and Climatic Change

“…The sea-temperature of the Atlantic was higher than it has been since, and there appears to have been none or very little ice to hinder the Vikings' communications between Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland and Labrador (Mowat 1965). Indeed Brooks (1926) considers that the polar ice-cap may have disappeared entirely during the summer months, to build anew each winter.…”