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Walter P. Kistler Book Award
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David Archer Receives
Walter P. Kistler Book Award for 2009
 Dr. Archer is the 2009 recipient of the Walter P. Kistler Book Award, which recognizes authors of science-based books that make important contributions to the public’s understanding of the factors that may impact the long-term future of humanity.
In The Long Thaw, Dr. Archer discusses the scientific realities of humankind’s continuing increases in the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Civilized humanity, he writes, has never seen a climate change as severe as global warming: “The benefits of using fossil fuels accrue now and into the current century until the fuel runs out, while the costs will last for millennia.”
What costs? The natural world is taking up CO2 about half as quickly as humans are releasing it, resulting in regional heat waves, stronger than normal hurricanes, droughts, and other climatic changes. Such shifts are already visible. But climatic shifts of the magnitude that causes the ice sheets to melt “would rearrange the landscape and societies of the Earth,” says Archer.
 Humankind has the potential to alter the climate of the Earth for hundreds of thousands of years into the future. … Climate change is a global issue that ramps up slowly and lasts for a long time. Negotiating a solution would require a degree of global cooperation that is I think unprecedented in human history.
— Dr. David Archer, The Long Thaw
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