Is the Temperature Rising? The Uncertain Science of Global Warming
Is the Temperature Rising? The Uncertain Science of Global Warming – Review
It’s hard to imagine a more relevant, timely, and notable book for our day than Philander’s book on global warming. Though I say the book is about global warming, I really must elaborate. You see, this is really a book on earth’s climate. Global warming is just a section of the book – a relatively small chapter at the end. The place of the book consists of background information about climate that enables the reader to understand (at least in concept) the logical arguments and issues connected to global warming. Whether you believe that individual intervention in the structure of the atmosphere will alter earth’s climate or not (and I’m personally hoping you have the sense to do so) this is a superlative book on climate issues in general. The book is broken into three "parts." The first part is really just an introduction and discusses things at a pretty high level. The second part deals with weather (variations in day to day special conditions). There is an introduction to ideas connected to absorption and heat of heat, atmospheric pressure and temperature gradients (what causes them), the hydrological cycle, winds, and how the ocean and atmosphere couple together. I mostly found the discussion about the ocean currents interesting. There is an unusually excellent discussion of El Nino and how it forms. There is also some excellent discussion about why ice ages have originally appeared over the earth’s history. [For a more directed discussion about ice ages, I suggest "Ice Ages, Solving the mystery," by John Imbrie and Katherine Palmer Imbrie. The major copy of the book is non-mathematical and has plenty of diagrams and illustrations to help convey concepts. The book too comes quite equipped with 13 appendixes that go into more quantitative detail. These appendixes use various equations, but require no skills in mathematics beyond high-school trigonometry and algebra. [For a more rigorous and complex text I suggest "The physics of atmospheres," by John T. Houghton."] The last (third) section of the book makes down to business involving the focus of global warming. It also discusses the ozone hole and provides an explaining discussion about why it appears over the southern glacial cap. I previously thought that one main bit of missing information is a breakdown by country and cause of the forms of pollution that can lead to global warming. It would be nice, for example, to see a chart that shows how much each country gives, the special contributions in each country, and the forms of fuels that are the most damaging. [This information is available from sources in the bibliography, however.] If I could summarize the author’s major premise it would be this: The atmosphere is an very complicated system that illustrates sometimes-chaotic behavior. Globally it is probably stable – we most likely will not cause runaway global warming and life will survive. Locally, however, the weather can and does perform wildly. We have the power to make our atmosphere more hazardous for our species. We are eventually taking a terrible gamble in genetically modifying several greenhouse gases, not by causes of a few percent, but by hundreds of percent. The fact there is uncertainty in the exact ultimate outcome is not the point. The point is we are gambling with the only atmosphere we have, and the results, if we loose, could be dire. I warmly recommend this book to anyone who feels an obligation to be further informed about what is, perhaps, the most important ecological topic of the day. Duwayne Anderson Saint Helens, Oregon October 12, 1999