Critical reviews of four recent books on climate change
We’re big fans of The Economist. In our opinion, it is the best single news source available. It covers the entire world and consistently provides context and relevance for every story. What we like best is that our liberal friends think it’s too conservative and our conservative friends think it’s too liberal. That’s precisely the balance we look for in a news source. And though we don’t always agree with The Economist’s positions (they were way off on the war in Iraq), it’s always clear where we part ways and why. So you can expect to see us reference many Economist articles on Max Gladwell. This week’s issue has several good pieces on the environment.
In Dead Water, they explore the issue of nitrogen-induced dead zones in the sea, which are largely caused by runoff from industrial agriculture. There is hope. In A Moment of Truth, they cover the issues of carbon trading and the Kyoto Treaty. We need a carbon tax. No Smoke and Mirrors is a small piece about LED street lights. Promising technology that still needs to advance. And there is an excellent review of four books on climate change. We’ve excerpted from that piece below, after the jump.
“ONE of the most troubling aspects of climate change is the feedback loop. As the world warms, so frozen earth begins to melt, which releases greenhouse gases, which warms the world up further. Something similar seems to be happening with the literature of climate change. As people write books on global warming, so they generate interest in the subject, which increases demand, which leads to the writing of even more books. Both these cycles result in a lot of hot air.
[The Hot Topic] will not be regarded as an important step in the field of climate-change literature. It is a competent summary of where the subject has got to, in terms of science, government policy and business, and will be quite handy for those who need to mug up on sustainability for tomorrow’s board meeting. Anybody looking for anything that engages the imagination, however, need not trouble themselves with it.
It starts from a promising point; if cap-and-trade is widely adopted, cleaner energy technologies will be in demand, so those who develop them will be the next energy billionaires. The book explains those technologies through the people trying to bring them to market. Some of the details are nice, such as the work of scientists trying to create enzymes to do the difficult job of breaking cellulose down to make ethanol. They go round collecting “extremophiles”—bacteria that can do tough jobs in difficult circumstances—from volcanoes and deep-sea vents. But the book is a tiring list with no narrative or analytical structure. And it is not helped by the silly title: “Earth: The Sequel”. The battle is to preserve the current planet, not to move on to the next one.
Having marshalled some powerful (though ultimately unconvincing) arguments against such measures, Lord Lawson suddenly announces: “I believe the case can be made for the introduction of an across-the-board carbon tax,” on the grounds that “if people like to feel that they are helping to save the planet by paying a carbon tax, they should not be deprived of the opportunity to do so.” But if Lord Lawson thinks people are wrong to believe that they should pay a carbon tax in order to save the planet, why doesn’t he argue against it? And if he doesn’t argue against it, why has he bothered to write this book?
In this case the presence of a co-writer adds to the charm of the story, for Robert Kunzig seems to have fallen for Mr Broecker and his world. It is easy to see why. Palaeoclimatology is full of people obsessing about fabulously obscure wrinkles in the climate’s history, and investigating them by drilling cores thousands of metres into the Arctic ice, or counting the oxygen atoms in minuscule foraminifer shells to learn just when the world froze and warmed: “the planet in a grain of sand”, says Mr Kunzig, who has a lovely appreciation of the poetry of science. Buy this one. Forget the rest.
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1 Global Warming » Hot Air: Four Books on Global Warming // May 19, 2008 at 4:54 am
[...] Max Gladwell wrote an interesting post today on Hot Air: Four Books on Global WarmingHere’s a quick excerptLord Lawson sets up straw men (“it is popularly supposed by politicians and the media”), credits them with beliefs that nobody serious holds (“that the sole cause of global warming is the growth in man-made carbon-dioxide emissions”), … [...]
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