Personally, I feel that I am due for a climate change refresher course. My opinions and information about climate change have not significantly changed since my college chemistry courses and seeing Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth." Seeing as I consider myself a serious environmentalist, this seems like a major oversight. Who knows? Maybe I am just another liberal sheep swayed by greedy, fear-mongering scientists?...I doubt it. But in the name of self improvement and challenging my own beliefs, I am going to review 3 books from across the spectrum of climate change opinions and attempt to objectively assess their arguments and importance. Then I will rant about the three books on a blog. I should also note that since I'm on vacation, I'm going to review popular literature instead of primary scientific literature. It's way more fun that way and if I was reviewing primary research papers, you would not have made it this far.
Eaarth by Bill McKibben
Eaarth represents the mainstream environmental end of the spectrum. Bill McKibben has earned his reputation as a strong proponent for environmental thought and policy. His first books such as The End of Nature and Deep Economy take a holistic view of environmental issues and connects them to many parts of the reader's everyday world. The title Eaarth is a reference to his new theory that significant damage has already been done to our environment and the worlds systems because of global warming. He then uses the term Eaarth as a reference to the new planet that we have created. According to him, our current planet is so fundamentally different from the historical Earth that it cannot accurately be described using the same word.
As you can imagine, the opening to this book is dark. He provides extensive and well-cited examples of the damaging changes caused by excess CO2 in the atmosphere. One statistic hit home for Iowa natives. To simplify McKibben's explanation, warmer air holds more water. Therefore, precipitation events will tend to be more severe. This immediately reminded me of the severe flood events that seem to be more and more frequent in Iowa recently. Overall, his warnings are well done and in fact, may be too well done. Instead of inspiring me to help slow down these looming catastrophes, at times I am instead tempted to hoard up on canned food and ammo and wait for the eventual collapse of society.
Fortunately for my mental stability, Eaarth eventually shifted to how society should respond to this new world. His first major topic is one that environmentalists sometimes have to push under the rug and ignore in the name of the "greater good": poverty. McKibben cites that further global warming severity will be heavily controlled by developing nations. Therefore, improving poverty issues is the most direct and most just method for improving our environment (and compensating for historical wrongs). From there, he defends his belief that small, independent, and flexible communities will be the best method for thriving on planet Eaarth. McKibben is not simply arguing for the traditional hippy back-to-the-land fix. He states that the internet and other advances in information technology will help these new small towns be more multi-cultural, open, and well connected. In his eyes, the internet will help overcome the biggest drawbacks to the small towns that are fading in developed countries (isolated, repressive, close-minded). I personally believe this may be wishful thinking on the authors part, but I would love to see a future as Bill McKibben envisions it.
Overall, McKibben managed to give an overview of the environmental movement with updates from the last few years. He left nearly no subculture unmentioned and no environmental leader up-quoted. His information was from legitimate sources and are argued for in a clear, interesting, and efficient way (something that will be a delightful change after finishing this blog post). His only drawback is that this book will create few environmentalists; it will just give veterans more ammo. For me, his arguments were the conventional on the topic of global warming policies, I found myself agreeing with nearly every comment he made.
Climate Confusion by Roy W. Spencer
Spencer's book was chosen to represent the opposite end of the global warming policy spectrum. It offers a critical view of the belief that global warming will have a significant effect. To be honest, it was the only book I could find at my public library that was critical of climate change. I have a feeling the liberal media might be limiting my access to the truth. After all, public libraries are the most blatant example of American socialism. But I digress, Roy Spencer has a Ph.D. in Meteorology from University of Wisconsin and a fairly solid list of credentials. Additionally, all of the praise on the opening pages insist that this is a highly scientific analysis of the issues.
In the name of objectivity, I tried to keep an open mind for the entire book and, when possible, give the author the benefit of the doubt. However, many different issues came together to erode my faith in the author and respect for his work. I will explain the weak points of this book in later paragraphs. However, I would like to start this review with the strong points of this book. The most important fact that you should take away from this is that Roy Spencer's theory is a defensible one. I cannot comment on the validity or strength of the data to support it, but it is possible that the meteorological mechanism he describes would actually counteract the heat caused by greenhouse gas build-up. It is currently one of hundreds of theories about the effect of increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Scientifically, his theory should be respected until contradicted by evidence. At a policy level, however, it is worth imagining what would happen if either of these theories are wrong. If the conventional climate change models are accepted, but incorrect, our nation and world will still have the benefits of a more flexible and stronger energy network that could respond more easily to disasters. Such a network would be expensive and the money might have been better used in other areas, but it's not a catastrophe. On the other hand, if Spencer's theory is accepted but incorrect, the world's governments will have sat on their hands while we do damage to our climate that cannot be easily undone.
Now I’m going to go through the problems with this book. First, he repeatedly accuses the scientific community of changing their conclusions in order to gain more funding from the government. This may seem minor, but as a student who has gone through the training to become a biologist, this is the worst kind of insult to a scientist. Changing your data or adapting your conclusions for personal gain is a mortal sin among scientists. Additionally, Spencer's accusation seems to be purely conjecture and he does not provide significant evidence to support it. Spencer's opinion of scientists seems to be quite low in general. He states, "scientists have a tendency to respond emotionally when you challenge them." From personal experience and training, this statement is a lie. From his writing, I believe I've discovered why he draws such emotional responses from scientists. These are all direct quotes from "Climate Confusion":
-"we scientists do not provide goods or services that are useful to the public"
-"When science tries to explain what happened long ago, when no eyewitnesses were available to make measurements, I do not consider that to be "hard" science."
-"weather forecasters are incompetent fools"
-"...there are a few "gray literature" science publications which are little more than science tabloids...The two most famous of these publications are Nature and Science"
To discuss this last quote, my general method for determining how important a publication is to think about how vague the title is. The more vague, the more important and difficult to get published in. This makes "Science" and "Nature" the most rigorous and important publications in science.
Another indication that Spencer lacks respect for science is that he spends only a third of the book talking about science. Despite the praise of the scientific rigor of this book on the front page, the following quotes occur in this book:
-"I believe that the only right that the natural world has are conferred upon it by humans"
-"The religious reverence some have for the environment is probably best categorized as Paganism"
-"The United Nation's dream of global governance is now closer than ever"
-"Free Market's provide the most prosperity for society"
-"...political pandering to class envy is the motivating force behind many proposed policy solutions to the global warming problem"
-"The most important thing we can do for the world's poor is to support the spread of freedom"
I apologize for listing Spencer's writing again, but I feel that these quotes speak for themselves and require no further analysis on my part. In short, I believe the author may have gotten off topic and no longer was simply defending his scientific theory.
My last major criticism of the book is that it was poorly written. The large font and giant margins reminded me of a paper I would have handed in for eighth grade English. Also, the book lacked citations and the majority of his examples lack any information that would help a reader check his data. The first verifiable source of scientific peer reviewed literature occurred on page 71 (the book is 182 pages long). Additionally, this particular paper was published 17 years ago. He also spent nearly an entire page summarizing the plot of the film "The Truman Show" to defend a somewhat minor point. My final critique is that he seems to have copied an pasted portions of the body of his book to make his introduction and conclusion to the book.
Overall, the book had a few chapters of legitimate scientific information but this was padded by political pandering and off topic rants from the author's personal life. All authors have a tendency to do this, but Roy Spencer did this to such a degree that it was hard to view his book as respectable. Also, his tone of writing was so condescending and snarky that my own inner monologue was starting to match it by the end. It was quite an unpleasant experience for my friends during Mardi Gras.
BONUS QUOTES:
"So many new oil finds are occurring that there are increasing numbers of geologist that don't believe all of it could have come from ancient life" (no citation)
"We would probably be unable to drive any species to extinction even if we tried" [A list of species driven to extinction by humans]
Whole Earth Discipline by David Brand
David Brand lies somewhere in the middle ground between these two authors. He has the background of a hard-core and highly respected environmentalist, but recently has taken an unconventional turn. The book jacket describes that he believes that we should work our way out of global warming with increasing urbanization, nuclear power, and biotechnology. These topics are so taboo to mainstream environmental thought that Brand needs to work very hard to defend this premise. In my opinion, he does this flawlessly. My environmentalist beliefs were completely reformed by some of his arguments. For far too long, environmentalists have had knee-jerk reaction to many of these trends instead of rationally debating the merits of these technologies.
Interestingly, the issue that I find to be his most debatable is urbanization. He argues that the most innovation, energy efficiency, and environmentalism comes from urban environments. These are all shown to be true. The main example from the United States is New York, which is surprisingly one of the greenest cities in the country per capita. He takes this a step farther and looks at the large expanses of slums that show surprising resourcefulness. He quotes Prince Charles as saying that Mubai's slums have "...an underlying intuitive grammar of design that subconsciously produces [a place] that is walkable, mixed-use, and adapted to the local climate and materials." This description is basically the gold standard to green construction. He also states that urbanization will lead to greening of the countryside and allow nature to take back large portions of it. I find this conclusion to be his weakest argument. As an Iowan, I've seen that lower population density in rural areas absolutely does not result in an improved natural environment.
His arguments for nuclear power are based on the fact that it is not a simple issue. Therefore, it seems silly to summarize it in a paragraph. Therefore, I would like to say that these are just a few quick points, but by no means a comprehensive defense of the technology. One good point he mentions is that most environmentalists believe that if we can't guarantee that we can contain the waste for it's 10,000 year life span (to pick an arbitrarily large number), then we should not create nuclear waste. In reality, that is assuming our society will stay largely unchanged for 10,000 years. Within just 5,000 years, our society will probably have gone one of two directions. Option A, our society continues to advance at the current technological pace. In 5,000 years we will find a little nuclear waste a laughably small problem. Option B, is the civilization collapsing for some future reason. In this scenario, a little radiation will probably not be a major problem compared to disease, predation, zombies, or potentially our robot overlords (my wager is on zombies). Therefore, the key is to make a good, and highly flexible plan for containing the nuclear waste. Also, nuclear has the disadvantage of having rare spectacular and memorable disasters while coal is a long term and everyday disaster of the same magnitude. I have to admit that I am convinced by his arguments on this front. In general I do not think it is a silver bullet, but it is a good short term method for base load energy generation.
His discussion on biotechnology is the most blatant example of environmentalists directly working against legitimate scientific evidence. In defense of biotechnology, older accepted methods for breeding have moved around large portions of genomes and have sometimes crossbred between species. Therefore, intentionally moving portions of genes from one species to another using genetic engineering is simply a more efficient method. As far as safety, conventional breeding has already created many strains of food that are toxic to certain people. In fact, all plants have complex cocktails of toxins meant to deter insects and other parasites. Farmers want to breed in many of these toxins into plants in order to improve the plants natural defenses. The key is to make sure none of these toxins effect people. Genetic engineering is just as likely to create these and already accepted breeding techniques. My personal issues with genetic engineering have been policy based and the fact that biotechnology has been a very powerful tool for already overly powerful agricultural corporations. Brand addresses this by pointing out the increasing movement of "open-source" biotechnology meant to be released into public domain. I personally find this very interesting and am going to find further reading into this. Once again, this summary has been an overly simplistic, but hopefully interesting summary of his arguments. I hope I've done them justice.
Additionally, he discussed environmental engineering as a method for combating global warming. It was an interesting discussion but not contentious because there is not yet any political debate about funding for such a project.
In quick succession, The Whole Earth Discipline manages to sound overly conservative then liberal, all while making logical sense. In doing this, Brand even makes the reader realize how environmentalism has become just another political tools for both parties to use. In reality green thought is connected to the core beliefs of both parties. He therefore proposes a new party called the blue-greens. This would be a group that parallels the original green party but with a greater emphasis on technology. Instead of working against certain forms of progress, the blue-greens will join into potentially environmentally damaging projects and help to improve them from the inside. It as an interesting idea and although I have been swayed by his arguments, I definitely do not consider myself a blue-green. In case you haven't noticed from my writing, I highly suggest reading this book. It is a well written discussion of highly controversial topics and it greatly altered my view of the environmental movement and government policies.
Interestingly, all of these books argue that humans are causing a significant effect on the atmosphere. The core difference between the authors is how we will fix this new situation. McKibben argues that we will become more adaptable and resilient by changing our social structures. Brand argues that we will be able to fix all the issues using the full range of technology available to us. Spencer argues that the world will fix itself. My attempt at a climate change refresher course just reinforced my initial beliefs; the science has not significantly changed. Humans are pumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere. The only decision to make is how to fix it.
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