[Amorymeltzer]

I hugely recommend reading Peter Brannen's The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything. I picked it up thinking it'd be a good book about climate change—it is—but it's so much more. It's an excellent journey through our planet's (bio)geochemistry, and really gives you a sense for the power and scope of CO2 over millions and billions of years. Snowball earth features prominently, and there are some really fascinating history and consequences of them.

[perrygeo]

Seconded. I learned a ton from it, as well as his previous book The Ends of the World on mass extinctions. His writing style is wonderful, he turns an academic subject into a page-turner.

The Story of CO2 taught me something I had never considered. It wasn't exactly that photosynthetic life started pumping out O2 and chilled the planet. Snowball earth happened way later. It was photosynthetic life that got buried in sediment and locked it away from aerobic respiration. The amount of carbon stored in the earth's crust is insane. Fossil fuels are just a minuscule fraction of that.

This has some implications for our current climate: If we want to use biology to sequester carbon (growing trees, algae, etc), it's only a temporary sink unless we lock it away for eons. Once it's eaten/burned, the CO2 is right back in the atmosphere. In short, we gotta physically put it back into the earth's crust if we want to draw down carbon.