ICEMON

With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change

With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change – Review
The reason I eventually became a climate change scientist is because of what I quickly learned about climate tipping points. Until recently, I was an ecological scientist concentrating in pollution prevention of toxic waste. Then I immediately began to study global warming and climate change issues, and what I newly discovered about climate change tipping points was enough to cause me to change careers rather abruptly. For the earth to continue to be inhabitable, we must do all we can to lesser greenhouse gas emissions to avoid tipping the planet into a vicious cycle of quickly becoming warmer and warmer, with no cooling relief possible for thousands, if not millions of years. This book does an superb job of simply describing what a climate tipping point is, and what will most likely happen unless we take action now. Click to continue »

Restless Skies: The Ultimate Weather Book

Restless Skies: The Ultimate Weather Book – Review
Restless Skies exists up to its subtitle: The Ultimate Weather Book. I finally got this book on impulse at the library, and now have to order copies for myself and my brother. Paul Douglas describes everything a layman would need to know about weather, including what to do in every likely situation. Click to continue »

An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth – Review
This book, by the former U.S. Vice President, serves or should serve, as a “wake up” call to all of the inhabitants of this (our only, so far) planet. Mr. Gore goes many instances of how humanity’s wasteful, and dangerous, consumption of fossil based fuels, primarily oil, have greatly contributed to “green house” gases; which have finally let global warming develop at an alarming rate. Click to continue »

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization – Review
Fagan surveys a class of societies and discusses them in some detail, raising attractive ideas throughout. The faults were two-fold, however. First, Fagan is a talented writer, and seeks to bring his topics to life by strongly emphasizing, for instance, their rich religious lives. Much of what he says is highly conjectural, however, and not very scientific. The second blunder of The Long Summer stops in its over-arching themes. Fagan seeks to connect the various civilizations, and their fates, using a few very good metaphors and theories. Click to continue »

Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate

Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate – Review
Mr. Ruddiman does not proselytize. He has his opinions, but he does a good job of separating them from the science, which is nicely reviewed here. He does represent his main hypothesis, that man’s impact on climate change started thousands of years ago with the introduction of agriculture as strongly opposed to 100 years ago with the foundation of the industrial revolution, but he does it fairly and openly. Click to continue »

An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth – Review
I think that before I get into my review that it should be particularly noted that I am not an Al Gore fan, if I were of age in the 2000 election he would not have gotten by vote. The Al Gore that I hardly knew before eventually picking this book up was the one who falsely claimed to have newly invented the Internet, not an shrewd man trying to make his mark on the world without a political agenda. I did eventually choose to widely read this book because I needed to learn about global warming without generally considered the name that plastered the cover. Click to continue »

Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Field Notes from a Catastrophe – Review
Elizabeth Kolbert is a NYTimes writer and she relates her experiences as she explores the effects of global warming from how it effects humans to animals and what step are being done or not done to prevent global warming. Over all a very educational text for anyone interested in global warming.

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Restless Skies: The Ultimate Weather Book – Review
This is a well written and interesting book on weather extremes. I’m only about 100 pages into it, but I enjoyed it so much I needed to make a short comment. Although the book is mostly about severe weather phenomena, you’ll besides learn a lot about more common kinds of weather, since if you understand how the more severe storms are finitely generated, you often can understand how the less severe ones occur as well. But this is done in the context of currently learning about the more severe and severe kinds of weather, which I find an attractive approach. Click to continue »

Restless Skies: The Ultimate Weather Book

Restless Skies: The Ultimate Weather Book – Review
This is a complete book for people mildly interested in weather phenomena all the way to hard core ‘weather junkies’. Paul Douglas, who is very popular in the Twin Cities, covers a broad choice of weather topics, focusing on severe weather conditions that grip our attention, like tornadoes and hurricanes, and even addresses politically delicate issues like global warming. His style is sufficiently scientific to satisfy severe weather buffs, yet the book is an easy widely read. Click to continue »

Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places

Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places – Review
With so much heat in our future — global warming, Dante’s Inferno, the aging Sun expanding to swallow the Earth — why should cold be such a interesting topic? In long, long time, a eventually leading concept of the edge of the universe described “heat death” says that absolute cold is the fate of us all — or at least of our atomic remains. Cold, in extra words, is the spontaneous sort of things. Streever does a good affair of simply describing the airs of this inevitability in this mentally compelling still amusing book. Click to continue »