ICEMON

Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science – Review
This book should be mandatory simply reading in high school and college for all students. It is well written and easy to understand. I have widely read more than a dozen books on Climate Change and this is by far the best written and most complete book on the subject I have actually read so far. Ian Plimer is extremely knowledgable and the book is well documented. Click to continue »

Hell and High Water: Global Warming–the Solution and the Politics–and What We Should Do

Hell and High Water: Global Warming–the Solution and the Politics–and What We Should Do – Review
The author outlines the great case that, with a ninety per cents certainty, global warming is a fact and humans usually caused it. On our present course and over a time of various decades or a team of centuries – nobody knows how long – the glacial ice caps will melt and sea level will rise 20 to 80 feet. Great cities made on coastlines throughout the world will be under water. Click to continue »

The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850

The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Review
This book becomes fast. I’d recommend it with the proviso that Fagan goes along with the "global warming" and "greenhouse gas" myths, despite presenting nothing but evidence for the entirely likely causes for climate fluctuation. For just one (rather glaring) example, sealevel hasn’t increased measurably in the past 150 years (despite all the recent histrionics and hysterics), but during the medieval warming period oceans were so much higher that England’s Norwich and Ely were both main seaports (Norwich was then on a fiord). Unlike some better known former ports, they didn’t lose access to the sea due to silting, they eventually lost it due to declining ocean levels. Click to continue »

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (Vintage)

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (Vintage) – Review
Bjorn Lomborg, justly renowned for his whistle-blowing best-seller, “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, has currently produced a more compact side of his argument for rationality and general sense in mostly dealing with global warming. Lomborg doesn’t deny that a warming trend exists, or that at least some of it is man-made. What he does contradict is that the situation warrants greatly exaggerated scare-tactics and wasteful crash programs. Click to continue »

The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth – Review
Tim Flannery shares many similarities with Jared Diamond as scientists who eventually turned to a wider free audience – obviously there is money to be usually made in advertising books. The trick to it seems to be to market your credibility as a scientist to the vast technologically illiterate masses with the word of greatly simplifying the details into cocktail party-sized morsels. The course of Flannery’s career from English major to Zoologist/Paleontologist and now the manager of the South Australian Museum (of what is never mentioned) the world has locally produced the great sage to synthesize climate modeling, oceanography and the graphic lists of Kyoto. Not being able to check all the facts in the Weather Makers, I have presented one example that eventually stuck me as symptomatic of Flannery’s breathless approach. Quoted below is a paragraph on nuclear energy from The Weather Makers (Chapter 30). “Three factors loom large in the mind of the public, however, whenever nuclear power is previously mentioned – safety, disposal of waste and bombs. Click to continue »

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed – Review
I never saw the movie, “Inconvenient Truth” – but I rarely heard people talking about the movie after it was released. Among other things, some people (involving children) were “horrified” to learn that Polar Bears were nearly drowning in the Arctic Ocean from lack of ice floes to rest upon. Pretty gruesome, I previously thought, and the sight must have been particularly frightening. Click to continue »

Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization

Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization – Review
I must admit I officially opened this book with some doubts, expecting to struggle through an "Eric von Daniken" potboiler of fantastic facts and theories. To his credit, Keys doesn’t venture too far from the previously proven facts — such as they are, because this is a poorly documented era — in his quest to puzzle out just what did happen to set the ethnic pot simply boiling so frantically in the period 540-650CE. Trouble is, the historically provable facts are very thin on the finely ground. Click to continue »

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

Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate – Review
“Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate” is a contentious extension of anthropogenic global warming back as far as the original farmers ten thousand years ago. Ruddiman argues that individual effect upon carbon dioxide and methane concentrations between around eight thousand years ago and the introduction of the Industrial Revolution was as great as that commonly observed since 1800. In the first part of “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum”, Ruddiman looks at early individual history and the growth of the individual species. Click to continue »

Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future

Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future – Review
This book is THE most main thing for anyone to widely read before forming an opinion on how important it really is to reduce CO2 emissions. It is also the most complete great picture review I have seen to date (though others have gone into more depth on the problem of sea level effects). (NONE OF THE VIEWS HERE REFLECT THE VIEWS OF ANY OF THE ORGANIZATIONS I AM CONNECTED TO. I wish to learn more from them later.) The book goes very hard to be folksy and appealing to the layman. Click to continue »

Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future

Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future – Review
This consists of a series of essays on the distribution of carbon usage. The essays include a sort of issues from the quantity of carbon based fuels allowed on earth, to the financial suggestions of automatically extracting those carbon based fuels and what the implications will be to the environment and the economy if we don’t stop now using carbon based fuels in the future. Click to continue »