Laboratory Earth

Schneider traces our climatic history not only from the beginning and up to the twentieth century, but deep into the twenty-first as well. He depicts the next one hundred years as a potentially perilous period for climate and life - unless we citizens of Earth first recognize and then work to control the unintended global scale experiment we are foisting on ourselves and all other life on "Laboratory Earth." This "lab" is not built of glass, wires, and tubes, but of insects, soils, air, oceans, birds, trees, and people. While no honest scientist can claim to have clairvoyant vision into the twenty-first century, Schneider optimistically demonstrates that enough is already known to command our attention and to insure that the juggernaut of human impacts on Earth doesn't turn into a gamble we can't afford to lose.

Stephen H. Schneider is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.