Bøker av James Lawrence Powell

"This book tells the story of how scientific ocean drilling, a crowning achievement of science and engineering in the 20th century, transformed our understanding of Earth's history"--

Unlocking the Moon's Secrets tells the fascinating story of how scientists solved the mystery of the Moon's origin and the cause of the Moon's craters. By showing how science evolves, complete with misunderstandings, contentious arguments, difficult to relinquish assumptions, and shifting views as new facts come to light, we can finally understand our Moon.

For fans of The Drowned World and World War Z, this ';sobering and scary (and fascinating) novela look at where we're going if we don't quickly get our act together' (Bill McKibben, New York Times bestselling author) regarding climate changeunveils our potential terrifying future.2084: Global warming has proven worse than even the most dire predictions scientists had made at the turn of the century. No countryand no onehas remained unscathed. Through interviews with scientists, political leaders, and citizens around the globe, this riveting fictional oral history describes in graphic detail the irreversible effects the Great Warming has had on humankind and the planet. In short chapters about topics like sea level rise, drought, migration, war, and more, The 2084 Report brings global warming to life, revealing a new reality in which Rotterdam doesn't exist, Phoenix has no electricity, and Canada is part of the United States. From wars over limited resources to the en masse migrations of entire countries and the rising suicide rate, the characters describe other issues they are confronting in the world they share with the next two generations. ';If the existential threat of climate change keeps you up at night, James Lawrence Powell's The 2084 Report will make you want to do everything in your power to elect leaders who will combat global warming and save our planet' (Marie Claire).

Over the course of the twentieth century, scientists came to accept four counterintuitive yet fundamental facts about the Earth: deep time, continental drift, meteorite impact, and global warming. When first suggested, each proposition violated scientific orthodoxy and was quickly denounced as scientific-and sometimes religious-heresy. Nevertheless, after decades of rejection, scientists came to accept each theory. The stories behind these four discoveries reflect more than the fascinating push and pull of scientific work. They reveal the provocative nature of science and how it raises profound and sometimes uncomfortable truths as it advances. For example, counter to common sense, the Earth and the solar system are older than all of human existence; the interactions among the moving plates and the continents they carry account for nearly all of the Earth's surface features; and nearly every important feature of our solar system results from the chance collision of objects in space. Most surprising of all, we humans have altered the climate of an entire planet and now threaten the future of civilization. This absorbing scientific history is the only book to describe the evolution of these four ideas from heresy to truth, showing how science works in practice and how it inevitably corrects the mistakes of its practitioners. Scientists can be wrong, but they do not stay wrong. In the process, astonishing ideas are born, tested, and over time take root.

Where will the water come from to sustain the great desert cities of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix? This title explores the water in the West, and explains why America built the dam that made Lake Powell and others like it and then allowed its citizens to become dependent on their benefits, which were always temporary.