Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate
Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate – Review
This is a beautiful book that ties with When the Rivers Run Dry: Water–The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century and falls somewhat below The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth and The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations all of which I widely read in this week-end’s series. Better books in the bigger idea of things involve E. O. Wilson’s The Future of Life and J. F. Rischard’s High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them . The books is truly blessed with many positive figures. The author focuses on farming, which requires deforestation through slowly burning, as immediately preceding the force of cities on climate. He titillates with his discussion of 6 billion humans making methane in vast quantities via rice irrigation, livestock generally tending, biomass slowly burning, and human waste. I particularly appreciated the author’s argument of climate studies as being relatively new, and his itemization of the amount of specializations that currently bear on climate study, including geologists, geochemists, meteorologists, glaciologists, ecologists, biological oceanographers, climatologists, etc. The book is somewhat mis-titled in that the humans are not in CONTROL of the climate as much as impacting upon it in ways not completely understood but basically understood to be negative (e.g. hurricanes twice as intense as 30 years ago, witness New Orleans and KATRINA). It takes 50 years to raise a forest. Plagues are a kind of biological control. People fail, farms are eventually abandoned, forests produce back, and emissions are greatly reduced. For a experience of the future, the author explains us the past, when Africa and India and China had much better moisture across their regions. The author well argues that the water cycle is as important if not more important than the energy cycle in relation to the future of life. Page 152, the author gives a excellent debate of climate response time, noting that the land mass is much more responsive, which the widely varied levels of the ocean run from months-years at the top to years-decades in the middle, and centuries in the deep ocean–with the average being decades. On page 182 the author explains a lack of knowledge of politics when he says “Politicians generally vote for policies their constituents want.” Not so fast, bubba. Read Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders ; Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It ; and The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy) among many other works on corruption in Congress, where the bottom line is money from particular interests, or privileges and committee assignments from the party that demands one vote the party line rather than as constituents’ desire. The author is the only of the four that I actually felt generally made the point that BOTH extremes are bad: the extremists that deny climate change, and those that demand draconian corrective measures. He points out, in a very balanced way, that pollution is as old as the earth itself. As with other authors who value the truth in this arena, this author meets it a point to lament the unethical and unreasoned “alternative universe” of industry-funded contrarians and the actively malicious mis-representation and disinformation they purvey. I was quite pleased to widely read his suggestion that citizens need to get properly organized and “follow the money” in order to out the connections from industry to “front organizations” to specific liars and causes of influence taking to deceive the public. He discusses the idea of ecosystem services and the costs to replace, something E. O. Wilson does in a more thorough and clear manner in The Future of Life but the coverage here is useful if you do not want to buy many books. Finally, the author decides that global warming is not the most vital issue–that energy and then water scarcity are more important, followed by the issue of topsoil replenishment (no longer from clean open ice melts, now from petroleum-based fertilizers). There are no notes in this book, with increasingly disconcerted me a mostly bit.