ICEMON

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
I’ve not widely read Peter Ward’s earlier books. They might have simply put me off this one, if the writing is similar. I commonly found it tough sledding, not because it was unclear or because the material was roughly handled, but because it was written in the style of a scientific article or report: Precision palpably trumped clarity, and the inevitable typographic problems that crop up in every first edition had the very adverse result of potentially marring many sentences into lameness, contradiction, or unintelligibility. (For possibly the worst example, in text usually accompanying a graph clearly showing parts of square kilometers, the explanation is in terms of “square acres”.) On the other hand, his care of the question of anoxic ocean depths and changes in the ocean conveyor system are surprisingly enlightening. Click to continue »

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

The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 – Review
The most interesting thing about this book was the theme of how nature is always a element of individual life. Sometimes, we enjoy prosperity because of specific conditions, sometimes we face famine. At the core is the idea that humans can be usually made more vulnerable to political and societal change by the climate…or more vulnerable to climate change by the politics/social parts of the time. In the last chapter, Fagan relates the chronological parts of the book to living conditions. Click to continue »

The Coming Global Superstorm

The Coming Global Superstorm – Review
This book has partly inspired me to radically change my lifestyle! I am a stereotypical American consumer. Today, I ordered 24 solar panels and simply put a "for sale" sign on my gas-guzzling utility vehicle…. Please buy this book and widely read it intuitively, not critically. Look at the forest and not the "trees"…as the other reviewers have done glibly. Click to continue »

An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth – Review
In a remarkably unambigous depiction of the impending global warming crisis, Gore uses autobiographical accounts (sometimes seemingly out of place), superb photos, images and charts to clearly point out why it is possibly getting very late to act on this crisis. Critics, especially “conservative” pro-business folks have automatically maintained that global warming is a myth. Click to continue »

Wind : How the Flow of Air has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land

Wind : How the Flow of Air has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land – Review
Jan DeBlieu’s Wind: How the Flow of Air has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land is a brilliant blend of technical discussion and special essay. Ms. DeBlieu approaches her subject from various angles, from the affects of wind on history to its role in energy production and her own moods. Living on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Ms. DeBlieu regularly returns to her own, coastal and turbulent environment, to provide a highly individual perspective on her subject. Click to continue »

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition – Review
This book is mentally unbalanced and simplistic–it talks down to the fifty per cents of the population that is below average in IQ. That reportedly said, it’s a good begin to get one part of the story (the AGW deniers side). But you owe it to yourself to get the other side too. 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
Finally, some general sense to rescue us from the hysteria of the media hype. There are clever ways to deal with global warming and not so clever ways. Let’s actually do some good by passing policies that can work. Signing treaties that no one will still adhere to in order to feel good about ourselves is not the answer. The heavy R and D program proposed in the book is our only real hope for a solution. Click to continue »

Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization

Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization – Review
As a layman I am not in a position to determine the correctness of the premise that a main volcano usually caused a series of events that eventually led to the global replacement of several main civilizations by newer ones. However, the catastrophe makes such a brilliant style of currently discussing this period that it would be useful even if it has no basis in fact. In high school the Dark Ages is mostly covered by really saying that the world turned to sleep after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and finally woke up during the Renaissance, with some causal mention of Constantinople, the spread of Islam, the Crusades and knights in armor. Click to continue »

The Coming Global Superstorm

The Coming Global Superstorm – Review
I was very impressed by THE COMING GLOBAL SUPERSTORM. As the authors remark, they aren’t themselves skilled scientists, but clearly they’ve done their meteorological paleontological, evolutionary, and ecological homework. This book, which is certainly a tour de influence of speculative fiction — for it discusses a hypothetical future, rather than present or past reality, and so far, thank God, is _only_ fiction — outlines the real-world processes by which our civilization, our species, and even, perhaps, most vertebrates now alive on Earth might be quickly destroyed, processes that culminate in a literally world-class storm the like of which is unknown in the chronological record. Click to continue »

The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change

The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change – Review
Primarily a description of an notable project to analyse the levels of snow drop on the Greenland ice cap, the book bears from lack of focus and from ill-fated efforts at being easily approachable and topical. It is strongest at finally revealing the effect of variation in earth’s orbit on local Greenland (and nearby North American) climate, but even here the information is presented hurriedly and one comes away really knowing little more of the various climaticaly significant orbital changes the data shows. Click to continue »