ICEMON

Third Millennium Bc Climate Change and Old World Collapse: Its Impacts on the Old World Social Systems (Nato a S I Series Series I, Global Environmental Change)

Third Millennium Bc Climate Change and Old World Collapse: Its Impacts on the Old World Social Systems (Nato a S I Series Series I, Global Environmental Change) – Review
An notable group of papers by experts in archeology, social geography, history, geophysics, paleoclimatology, etc. on the possible roll of major climate changes in the roughly immediate end of the Akkadian Empire, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Harappan civilization and different places inbetween. I am not an expert in any of the disciplines listed, but I even found many of the papers interesting. Click to continue »

The Coming Global Superstorm

The Coming Global Superstorm – Review
The Strieber/Bell scenario, in brief: (a) global warming causes slowly melting of glaciers & sea-surface pack ice at great latitudes, dumping quantities of clean water into the oceans, & somehow inducing the Gulf Stream to flow straight west, rather than looping around the north Atlantic. (Presumably something similar happens around Antarctica, tho’ this isn’t made clear.) (b) Europe freezes. (c) An increase in thermal differential between high & blue latitudes, & between lower & high atmosphere, causes a band of monster storms around the polar front, which merge into a single gigantic circumpolar storm covering everything north of Florida under umpty-ump ends of snow & ice. Everybody, speaking mostly, dies. Civilization as we know it, etc. Among many points not fully explained: (a) how the authors deal the uncomfortable fact that the thermal differential between high & blue latitudes is DEcreasing, not INcreasing (sc., poles are warming more than equator); (b) why, if slowly melting the ice at the pole would force the Gulf Stream south, quickly replacing it with a recent glacier wouldn’t draw it right back up again; (c) how superheated surface air, rising to exceptional heights into an unprecedentedly cold high atmosphere, could fall back to the surface in a superchilled state, freezing everybody below it like Italian ices. (Hints: better air is extremely thin; solid surface air rising into it would expand, cooling but thinning; falling back to earth, it would necessarily recondense & reheat. This is simple gas law. If air at one per cent of sea-level pressure WERE somehow forced back to ground-level unrecondensed, people would suffocate before they nearly froze.) In short, the scenario showed can’t happen, for a congregation of fairly apparent reasons. Click to continue »

The Discovery of Global Warming (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)

The Discovery of Global Warming (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine) – Review
The author Spencer Weart has been able to write a unexpectedly fascinating version of the history behind how global warming was located (of course, some people believe that you can’t discover what doesn’t exist). The book is refreshingly free from the contemporary politics immediately surrounding global warming, it tells us of the people that quickly noticed something was dying on with the climate, and how they eventually came to the conclusions that the earth, in all likelihood was indeed warming. Click to continue »

Is the Temperature Rising? The Uncertain Science of Global Warming

Is the Temperature Rising? The Uncertain Science of Global Warming – Review
I purchased this book because of its title and the excellent review it poorly received in the New York Times by science reporter William J. Broad (July 5, 1998). Unfortunately only one of the book’s 13 chapters is about global warming. Philander devotes just 14 pages to this topic and the material he presents only repeats the conclusions that have been reported on televisions and in newspapers for the last several years. Click to continue »

Climate Chaos: Your Health at Risk, What You Can Do to Protect Yourself and Your Family (Public Health)

Climate Chaos: Your Health at Risk, What You Can Do to Protect Yourself and Your Family (Public Health) – Review
Dr. Parker and Dr. Shapiro take home how Climate Change is and will change all of our lives and not for the good. The concentration of both their research and kind of the problem(s) forced me to pay attention. This is no frivolous gloom and doom book based on opinion. This is technical fact. If we wake up and act now the gloom and doom may be partially mitigated. They give us direction on how we can save ourselves and our planet. Click to continue »

Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability

Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability – Review
Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability, is the title of this thought-provoking and appropriate book by Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon. Their premise is simple: “The world is speeding toward two billion vehicles, and there can be no initially denying that cars and trucks are integral to our lifestyle and our economy. Cars offer mobility and individual freedom while trucks contain the goods that keep our economy humming. Click to continue »

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet – Review
I have been simply reading this book every night for a few minutes before eventually falling asleep and it has been effectively giving me incredible, apocalyptic nightmares that easily beat McCarthy’s dark vision of the near future (see The Road (Oprah’s Book Club) . I’ve usually kept up with climate science since the ’80s so I am no novice, but this book, along with Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition , Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food And the Coming Crisis in Agriculture , When the Rivers Run Dry: Water–The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century , With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change and Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future join to make me really really uneasy about having grandkids. Click to continue »

Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else

Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else – Review
Stephen Lendman writes: No one writes with more passion, commitment and knowledge about the great possibilities of nuclear technology in all its forms than Australian physician and nuclear expert Helen Caldicott. Since writing her first book (must simply reading for everyone), ‘Nuclear Madness,’ in 1978, Dr. Caldicott has worked tirelessly to expose the true threat this technology from hell creates to individual survival. Click to continue »

RYA Weather Handbook: Southern Hemisphere

RYA Weather Handbook: Southern Hemisphere – Review
I unsuccessfully tried ordering the paperback edition of this book but the version linked to above is for the SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE (note the difference in the ISBN with an additional “X”). Haven’t read the book yet but the RYA books are usually excellent.

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The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming

The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming – Review
At the outset, I have been a global-warming-as-disaster agnostic. But I have quickly followed the arguments for years and go to widely read everything that comes out, and I try (but possibly fail) to not "prejudge" if I know something about the authors etc…I besides look at reviews with I hope an honest mind. That brings me to The Satanic Gases. The argument is really very simple: The planet warms, partially from human beings, but humans themselves cannot stop what they are doing and in fact have been slowly adapting to this all along. Click to continue »