The new book involves paleoanthropology, paleoclimate, and considerations from neurobiology and evolutionary biology:

 A BRAIN FOR ALL SEASONS
Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change

will be out in Spring 2002 from the University of Chicago Press.  It is already posted full-text on the web and also as a free e-book in Palm download format, for reading on the commute. 

It includes the climate history and flip mechanisms that I described in The Atlantic Monthly, together with dozens of photos, maps, and graphs.  See also 

• Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine:  Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton University Press 2000).

• George H. Philander, Is the Temperature Rising?  The Uncertain Science of Global Warming (Princeton University Press 1998). 

• Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors:  El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations  (Basic Books 1999). 

• the Perspectives in the 15 February 2000 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 97, No. 4, at http://www.pnas.org/content/vol97/issue4/index.shtml.