Paleoclimatology is a review of the history of the climate of the Earth from the time of its formation four-and-a-half billion years ago to the present. The field, according to John Imbrie, a leading paleontologist at Brown University, is "ripe for synthesis," with broad implications in geology, geophysics, geochemistry, oceanography, and the atmospheric sciences. In this work, the author addresses several topics rarely discussed in paleoclimate summaries,...