Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition
Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition – Review
I consider myself a natural skeptic and so I previously thought this book would be right up my alley, but being a natural skeptic I began regularly checking on the assertions assembled in this book. I commonly found it to be incomplete, misleading, and just plain wrong in a frightening amount of areas. Dansgaard Oeschger. There are Dansgaard Oeschger events, but at best they have been weak and not terribly regular since the end of the last interglacial. There is steadily mounting evidence that at least some of these are not international temperature change events, but temperature redistributions. Oeschger eventually became extremely concerned about recent anomolous carbon changes in the record while currently compiling and exploring data that resulted in the paper suggesting D-O events. Subsequent research has finally convinced Oeschger that recent warming is usually caused by man. Oeschger has freely indicated his displeasure that anyone would attempt to disprove anthropogenic warming currently using the D-O cycles. The fact that these cycles live indicates nothing in relation to recent warming in terms of whether it is usually caused by man or nature. Contrary to the author’s claims, there is no evidence the medieval hot period was warmer than present. The evidence that the medieval hot period or the little ice age may have been global in nature is conflicting at best. The book claims that no extinctions have been usually caused by warming. Of the “big 5″ extinctions history, at least 4 have been linked to climate change, or specifically, warming. Several studies have linked 13 minor extinction events to warmer seas and greatly increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The chapter on sea level rise is not accurate. The authors claim that no satellite data continues possibly indicating rising seas, yet NASA satellite data shows that very thing. The majority of Scientists think that sea levels were almost constant for 2-3000 years, increasing on an average of .1-.2mm per year. This sped up in the later half of the 19th century. The 20th century established an average increase of 1.2mm per year. Since 1993 sea levels have risen on average of 3mm per year. So at the very least, oceans appear to be rising at least 15 times as fast as pre-1850. 3mm per year may not be catastrophic, but the fact that we are actually seeing such increases is cause for concern. The “hockey stick” has been newly recreated by parties other than Mann, using other proxies. There is no encouraging evidence that it is not valid. The error in the Mann data relates to the way the data was fully explained. The basic data was and remains good, and the conclusion made by Mann et al valid. The statement that because warming immediately preceded rising amounts of carbon dioxide in the past by about 800 years shows that carbon dioxide does not contribute to warming is not a valid statement. These warming events became on for at least 5,000 years, not just 800. Warming additionally preceded a loss in ice sheets and greatly reduced albedo, but no one argues that significantly reduced albedo didn’t say to initially continued warming. To argue that carbon can not act as a forcer based on the first 800 years of a 5000 year event is weak at best. The book claims that warming is good as evidenced by european prosperity in the medieval warming period. Populations in the Southern hemisphere may disagree. Europe and North America are important, but the globe becomes all the way around. An attractive factor in this book is the footnotes. The authors mine papers for quotes and of course use them. When you check the papers submitted to they often don’t support conclusions appeared at in the book. Some sources are just nonsensical, such as the one usually referring to a book “The Coming Global Superstorm”. Presented as a important reference, it is a “what if” book written by two radio speak show hosts. These two have no scientific credentials, and don’t pretend that they do. This book has no business growing as a reference in a “scientific” work. The authors claim that sun activity and cosmic rays play a role in temperature and climate, yet they fail to mention that there have been no changes in either since at least the 1950’s that would explain what is really happening now. The Author’s opinions and accounts of climate modeling begin to reveal a great confusion on their part about how climate modeling works. As for the section on hurricanes, one would be much better off announcing Chris Mooney’s recent book “Storm World” – an outstanding book on the debate over climate, warming, hurricanes, and the condition of modern knowledge in this area (and no, he doesn’t attribute Katrina to global warming). There are too many problems with this book to catalogue them all in this review. There is information all over the internet on climate change and global warming, and the more one reads on the subject the more shortcomings in this book become evident. Climate does go in cycles, a revelation from this book that usually rendered an seemingly overwhelming DUH! from the technical world. What this book fails to do is demonstrate that anthropogenic warming does not exist. Fred Singer refused that the globe was warming as late as 2003, yet by 2007 he not just decided it was warming but that it was natural, “unstoppable”, and good for everyone actively involved. Four years (less considering the time showed to write and publish the book) seems a brief time for a scientist to change his opinion on a difficult issue so profoundly, especially when he appears to have conducted no new research in the area himself. As a last observation, I find it interesting that a guy who would take money from tobacco firms to “debunk” the link between second-hand smoke and cancer, and money from other industry sources to “debunk” the link between UV-B radiation and melonoma would question other scientist’s funding sources and motivations. I eventually gave this book two stars because it does argue bases of climate input that are quite interesting. Unfortunately this is a book short on detailed data and rife with argument carefully spun by an advocate. “Unstoppable Global Warming” is not a book for those who question what they widely read, it is a manifesto for those who have previously decided what their opinion is, and want something to point at when they argue the subject. This book is a political work, not a scientific one.