There is a terrific feature on Harvard University geochemistry professor Charles Langmuir and our newly revised and expanded book HOW TO BUILD A HABITABLE PLANET: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind in the September issue of the Harvard Gazette.

From the article:

If there’s one thing Charles Langmuir wants to give people, it’s a sense of scale. The scale of their lives in human history, of human history in the lifetime of the Earth, and of the Earth in the long, broad span of the universe.

In other words, he wants to give them a little humility.

“You realize how small we are and that we are [just] a particle of the whole,” said Langmuir, Higgins Professor of Geochemistry and director of Harvard’s Mineralogical and Geological Museum.

A better sense of proportion might influence behavior, he said, so that people act as a part of nature rather than just users of it.

“It’s really what’s needed for the environmental problems we face,” Langmuir said.

Langmuir is in a somewhat privileged position to size up humanity. For the past 10 years, he worked to update “How to Build a Habitable Planet” (1985), a legendary textbook in the geosciences known for its accessibility and for the comprehensive view it takes of the Earth and its place in the universe. Earlier this month he discussed the book in a talk at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Langmuir, who came to Harvard in 2002, spent 20 years at Columbia University as a colleague of famed geoscientist Wallace Broecker, author of the original book. Broecker, who coined the term “global warming,” said he wrote “How to Build a Habitable Planet” because he wanted people to think more broadly about the Earth, its origins, and our impact on the planet.

The second edition, released this summer, has been greatly revised. As co-author, Broecker reviewed changes and revised some of the original chapters, but Langmuir did the bulk of the research and writing.

The original book’s nine chapters have been expanded to 21, and the page count more than doubled, to 720 from 300. That expansion was partly because Langmuir increased the book’s scope. The original didn’t include a discussion of biology, a central aspect in the Earth’s habitability, and today considered a powerful force in transforming its physical environment. Also fresh is a discussion of exoplanets, which weren’t discovered until the 1990s; recent research on the origins of life; findings on dark matter and dark energy, now known to be enormous forces in the universe; and insights on ocean floor thermal vents — Langmuir’s specialty….

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Princeton Primers in Climate is our new series of short, authoritative books that explain the state of the art in climate-science research. Written specifically for students, researchers, and scientifically minded general readers looking for succinct and readable books on this frequently misunderstood subject, these primers reveal the physical workings of the global climate system with unmatched accessibility and detail.

Today the series and its new book, David Randall’s Atmosphere, Clouds, and Climate, received a nice review from Justin Gillis, environment writer for the New York Times on the NYT.com’s popular Green blog.  Gillis has written recently about clouds’ effect on climate change, and he remarks on the book’s accessibility:

Readers ready for a book-length treatment of the topic may find the right level of detail in “Atmosphere, Clouds, and Climate,” a new book by Dr. Randall published by the Princeton University Press. Dr. Randall, a professor at Colorado State University, is a leading climate scientist. His book is specifically aimed at college undergraduates taking their first dive into the subject, but anyone with a measure of scientific literacy should be able to follow it.

It walks readers through the basics of the energy cycle on the planet before embarking on a deeper consideration of feedbacks involving clouds and other parts of the “earth system,” as scientists call it.

Check out the review here, and a list of other books in the series on our website here.

We hear a lot of noise and confusion on the subject of climate. As the subject has become politicized, the climate system has become a subject of high interest outside of the climate and Earth science community, and even outside of the scientific community altogether. Here at Princeton University Press, we felt that it was high time to launch a new series of books that gives scientifically minded readers the facts on how climate works.

Princeton Primers in Climate takes the complex climate system, and breaks it up into all its component parts, to explain how each part works and contributes to the working of the whole. Each book in the series is short, affordable, conversational and accessible in tone, and also quantitative. The books do include a handful of key equations (not beyond first-year, college level calculus). This is because these books are about the facts – the physics – of how climate works, so a few equations are needed to make the science absolutely clear. They are meant to reach a wide, interdisciplinary audience of readers who have no specialized background in this field, but who can handle a little bit of physics and math. For anyone looking for succinct and readable books on this frequently misunderstood subject, written by leading researchers in the field of climate science, these primers reveal the physical workings of the global climate system with unmatched accessibility and detail.

Published in November, the first title in the series is The Global Carbon Cycle. Written by David Archer, notable climate scientist and frequent contributor to realclimate.org, the book looks at the carbon cycle – an essential driver of the climate system – and its impact on climate across different geological timescales, from the deep past up to the present day. The carbon cycle is something of a thermostat for Earth’s climate, given the direct cause and effect relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperature. Interestingly, however, it can stabilize the Earth’s climate or amplify natural or man-made variations in climate, depending on the timescale you’re looking at. In this sense, it was a co-conspirator both in past ice ages and in times when the Earth went through warm periods and had no ice at all.

To discover how exactly carbon influences the climate system over the short and the long term, this is the book to read. Firmly grounded in advanced climate science research but written in an accessible style, The Global Carbon Cycle makes an essential contribution to current debates surrounding climate change – by clarifying exactly what we know and don’t know about this fundamental part of the climate system.

Stay tuned for forthcoming books in this exciting new series, including The Oceans and Climate by Geoffrey K. Vallis, Natural Climate Change by Mark Cane, Atmospheric Processes by David Randall, Climate Sensitivity by Jeffrey Kiehl, Planetary Climates by Andrew Ingersoll, The Cryosphere by Shawn J. Marshall, Paleoclimate by Michael L. Bender, and Terrestrial Hydrology and the Climate System by Eric F. Wood.