|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
A Primer for everybody interested in the Climate Debate Nov 02, 2009
This should be required reading for everybody who wishes to be taken seriously on either side of the debate of the century. The debate has been almost cut off by those claiming that "The Science Is Settled". Few people who make such a claim know 10% of the facts related here. For those wishing to know the facts, read this book.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Required Reading Oct 03, 2009
This book should be read BEFORE anyone watches AIT (Gore's movie), if it is over your head - go back to grade school. It's presentation of the background, prespective, and scientific methodology for understanding climate change and effects are very well laid out. The Discovery Channel would do well to have these guys produce a documentary series.
RE does not go really deep on its topics;(I think due to OSHA's 40# weight limit)for that one needs specialty books such as "Heaven and Earth", "Solar Fraud", "Shattered Consensus" , "Unstoppable Global Warming - Every 1500 years", "Chilling Stars",etc.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Pushes the Re-Set Button on Both Gore and Lomborg Oct 03, 2009
The more I read, the less I know and the more frustrated I grow with the insanity of academic, government, corporate, and non-governmental stovepipes of knowledge in isolation.
Right up front this book, read crossing the Atlantic from Madrid with a bad case of bronchitis, forces me to go back and downgrade my reviews of everything by Al Gore, and insert an update with apology and revisit for the work of The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World whose new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (Vintage) I am buying today as part of my apology. In the process of just doing that, I discovered Lomborg's edited work, Global Crises, Global Solutions and the first two words I saw, "Copenhagen Consensus," sold me. Denmark is one of a tiny handful of "smart nations" and pioneered the citizen wisdom council concept that Jim Rough writes about in Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People.
Opening quote on page 5: "Fedor Dostoevsky once said, `A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else." What an epitaph for partisan governance based on lies.
Before I lay out my fly-leaf notes, a comment spanning all the books I have read:
1. It is not just the Republican's who make war on science, the Democrats do as well. The two-party tyranny is corrupt across the board, and its worst crime after selling out to Wall Street and eradicating the integrity of the electoral process has been to dumb down the Republic and stifle informed inquiry and deliberative dialog.
2. America--and the world--have largely lost the art of critical thinking, what Jack Davis calls "analytic tradecraft," and in consequence our governments, corporations, and other entities are "out of control." We desperately need "Open Everything" and a renaissance of collaborative consensus with full access to all the facts.
The author's have, for me, pushed the reset button. They provide a tremendous catalogue of scare stories and inaccuracies, and in all this, take special care to demolish Al Gore in absentia (since he will not accept any public debate, only "safe" didactic "shows"). In a court of law Gore's film is found to have nine explicit and substantial errors of fact.
My notes:
+ Scientists don't understand their own science, especially in historical context, the public is a hundred times worse off. WE HAVE A BILLION YEARS TO GO BEFORE EARTH GETS 10% HOTTER.
+ The climate system may be the most complex system within the system of systems called Earth, and our knowledge of it is pathetically incomplete.
+ Science permeates every aspect of public and private life, if we do not restore our citizens' grasp of science we will lose the ability to make good communal decisions that are sustainable.
+ The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is roasted (pun intended) and once again we see the need for total transparency of all UN data and findings so as to better understand their errors of omission and commission.
+ "Species come and go but 'life' is tougher than anything." This was a hugely important observation for me, backed up by documented examples of where the Earth has previously gone through 75-85% extinctions, combined with the observation that the time line between two pulses of a single extinction "event" was TEN MILLION YEARS!
+ Methane from animals is in the top three of climate change factors, one more reason to listen to Francis Lappe Moore in Diet for a Small Planet.
+ The book trashes the US Department of Energy on multiple fronts, points out that NASA and DoE do not play well together such that space-based energy options are not being properly researched and developed, and is generally very pro nuclear to include waste no longer being an issue with new processing methodologies.
+ They favor a carbon tax rather than cap and trade, the latter too corrupt.
Page 255, sources of modeling error:
1. Model imperfection
2. Omission of important processes
3. Lack of knowledge of internal conditions
4. Sensitivity to initial conditions
5. Unresolved heterogeneity
6. Occurrence of external forcing
7. Inapplicability of the factor of safety concept
Over-all I was impressed by the totality of the project in this book, which provides a superb history of Earth along with superb reviews of the various sciences that must be brought to bear on climate change. This is a tremendous primer, along with the other books I link to, and I strongly recommend it for both undergraduate and graduate courses as well as the general adult reader. I actually have a note, no kidding, "This book inspires reverence."
This is a brilliantly told story, carefully constructed. The chapter on Cosmic Rays was completely new to me and totally absorbing.
Their own proposed program:
+ Use renewable energy where possible
+ Be aggressive on hybrid transport
+ Build energy-efficient buildings
+ Overhaul national and continental power grids (they do not mention Buckminster Fuller's global plan)
+ Work on solar both land and space-based.
+ Rapidly expand nuclear capacity while adopting safe recycling.
There is a superb discussion of error and uncertainty, including random error and the misapplication of statistics as well as incomplete data and models that are a travesty of false assumptions and relations.
I put the book down feeling somewhat righteous, as their final conclusion boils down to this: Politics is about consensus, Science is about being right rather than being believed. Governments--and the scientists and media personalities that serve as courtiers to governments, are fraudulent and not serving the public interest. Intelligence, done right, is similar to science: the truth at any cost. E Veritate Potens.
The summary is very well done and the ending was "practically poetic."
Other books I recommend to balance this one:
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition
See all of my Reviews, and Graphics that Amazon destroyed, at the Public Intelligence Blog, Phi Beta Iota.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
I wish this book were a best seller Sep 01, 2009
Everything I have been trying to explain to my friends about the exaggeration of "human caused" climate change is articulated in this book. I'm not quite done with it yet, as I am reading it cover to cover. It does a great job of providing a clear high level understanding of so many integrated topics (which is of course the only way to understand the more focused questions facing us today.) I think the authors have done an outstanding job and I recommend this to anyone willing to take the time to learn and understand the wonders of this planet.
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
A Wealth Of Information Aug 07, 2009
The book The Resilient Earth by Allen Simmons and Doug Hoffman is a book about the earth and its climate from its birth. The book consists of a wealth of material and information on the earth and its history. Messrs. Simmons and Hoffman provide a real education. The text is very readable in its explanation of a vast amount of information. There are many stunning illustrations and graphs. The work is very well referenced with numerous references to scientific articles. The book is an impressive work.
Among the topics presented in detail in this book are the earth's time intervals - eons, eras, periods, and epochs of earth`s geological history. Each concept is clearly defined. All the time intervals of the earth are presented in tables with the names and dates. The authors also discuss ice ages, the major time intervals of extinction of earth species such as the end of the Permian period and the end of the Cretaceous period, the changes in the earth's orbit around the sun and the Milankovitch cycles, The tectonic plates at the surface of the earth and how these plates effect the movement of continents over time, and the effect of the solar magnetic field and cosmic rays on the earth's climate. The authors also detail the differences between earth and Venus and how these differences cause abrupt dissimilarity in climate.
Regarding the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis the authors discuss the scientific method and the failure of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) to adhere to it. Specifically the authors detail the unreliability of the IPCC simulated computer climate models. The authors also take to task climate alarmists who publish fallacious pseudo scientific papers based on unreliable or messaged data and/or methodologies. Included among these false reports is the infamous hockey stick of Michael Mann.
Regarding anthropogenic global warming the authors see "no immediate threat" (p. 312). However they believe carbon dioxide could be a major problem in the future. The authors reject as ineffective and harmful such environmentalist proposed solutions as wind power and carbon cap and trade. Instead the authors propose among other solutions certain solar power technologies, a great expansion of nuclear power, more energy efficient homes, and transportation alternatives.
Messrs. Simmons and Hoffman perceive a greater threat from anthropogenic carbon dioxide than I do. The earth's carbon dioxide level in the last millennium is the lowest it has been since the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago. Yet this book is and excellent resource. The book deserves to be widely read.
|
| | |
|
|
