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Saturday, August 8, 2009

The Resilient Earth: Science, Global Warming and the Fate of Humanity


Product Description
A million years after the birth of our sun, the violent explosion of a nearby supernova nearly ended life on Earth before it began. Over the next four and a half billion years, forces of nature shaped our planet and the life it harbored. Barely surviving the traumatic birth of the Moon, buffeted by supernovae, and bombarded by asteroids, the resilient Earth endured. And despite planet-freezing ice ages, devastating mass extinctions, and ever changing climate, life not only survived, it thrived. Today, we are told all life on Earth is threatened by a new peril--human-caused global warming. The Resilient Earth presents the science behind global warming for a general audience, separating fact from fiction and truth from exaggeration
About the Author
Authors Doug L. Hoffman and Allen Simmons both have strong backgrounds in science and computer modeling. Hoffman has a PhD in Computer Science from the U. of North Carolina where he did research in Molecular Dynamics Simulations and high-speed comparison methods for RNA, DNA and protein sequences. Currently he serves as senior grid architect for a major IP company and as an adjunct Professor of Computer Science at U. of Central Arkansas and Hendrix College. Simmons has a BSEE from U. of Miami and wrote the computer systems software for the world¿s first weather satellites-TIROS-Television/Infra-Red Observation Satellite. After TIROS, he spent 12 years working with scientists and engineers on NIMBUS weather satellites which collected meteorological, atmospheric, geological, and oceanographic data. NIMBUS had a profound impact on knowledge of Earth¿s dynamic behavior. On the island of St. Croix, USVI, Simmons and Hoffman developed a computer system to track objects at great ocean depths.