DWD's Reviews

Well-stated from this former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA. Roy Spencer presents a well-stated and reasoned defense for the "deniers" of global warming, although he does not deny the globe is warming, he denies that we can definitively lay it at the feet of hydrocarbon emissions. The greatest strength of Climate Confusion is its readability - Spencer has a great sense of humor and lets it shine throughout - he reminds me of Dave Barry quite a bit. Spencer cites the difficulty in creating computer-based climate models and the difficulty in understanding all of the relationships between the myriad of variables that come together to create the ill-understood phenomenon we call weather. For example, as has been oft-noted by Al Gore, carbon dioxide levels have risen in the last century. Spencer notes that we have no idea what that exactly means for the global climate. Will water vapor increase due to an increase in global temperatures? Will the s

Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 is, by definition, an introduction to the climate phenomenon of the same name. Actually, it is quite similar to a History Channel documentary of the same name. On page xix Fagan notes that historians are either "parachutists" (big picture) or "truffle hunters" (love all of the details of one particular era or topic). Fagan warns that this is a parachutist book - an overview. So, what of this overview? Fagan starts with the Vikings and covers an area that is better covered by Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . However, his stories of how the fishing industry was affected by the shift to a colder climate was surprisingly interesting. A lengthy discussion of how the colder climate change brought more disease, famine and general mayhem is punctuated by the single best one page description of the changes in farming methods that came about in t

An answer to those who find it "completely immoral, even to question" the scientific "consensus" I t was UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland who declared that it was "completely immoral, even to question" the UN's authority and scientific consensus about global warming. (pp 307-8) Quotes like that make a free speech-loving teacher angry. Isn't science about questioning? Isn't peer-reviewing about questioning? I guess that's why I teach history, government and economics and not science. In the old days I used to be an alarmist. I showed proto-versions of An Inconvenient Truth to middle schoolers that told them the oceans would be dead by the year 2000 if we did not stop throwing plastic pop can holders into the sea (my students lived in Indiana so I guess they weren't much of a threat to the sea anyway). However, my training as a junior historian finally kicked in and I started looking around for other

There's a lot of meat to this "tween" novel. Quite enjoyable and discussion-provoking Emma Clayton The Roar is a more "kiddie" book than I normally read. This one is aimed at the tween crowd (the book says down to grade 3 but I can't really imagine anyone under the age of 10 getting into it) and I found it to be quite compelling despite being aimed at the younger set and the occasional clunky simile and/or phrase. The Roar has a sequel called The Whisper , which is soon to be published. The book is set in a dismal future in which religion is gone (not really mentioned but people say, "My odd!" rather than "My God!") and the environment has been destroyed by mankind to kill of the animals. 45 years before the story an animal "plague" caused all of the animals to attack people in a crazed frenzy. So, people retreated to just a few countries (UK, Canada and a few others), became part of a highly stratified socie

A quick and thought-provoking read The thesis of Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness , an exceedingly-well footnoted book, is that some on the ultra-left of the American political scene have pet theories that they espouse and that they hate it when facts do not bear out their theories. Among these are what Flynn calls "The Five Big Lies". The Five Big Lies are: 1. American women live under a patriarchy. 2. America is the World's leading threat to the environment. 3. America is a racist nation. 4. The US is an imperial power. 5. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Daniel J. Flynn Flynn quotes his opponents extensively and then rebuts their arguments with his own extensive research from a wide variery of sources (he has over 500 end-notes, often with commentary - not a small task). Flynn does not claim that the US is perfect in any of the above 5 areas. Far from it. He just submits that

             Disappointed My mother in law bought me three Brian Fagan books for Christmas last year because they were on my Amazon Wish List. I read the first one The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 right away and enjoyed it. I gave it four stars. . I was saving this one, hoping to enjoy it just as much. Now, I am worried that I'll never muster enough interest to read the third one. The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations seems rushed - a poorly edited and a poor man's version of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed with some global warming hype thrown in for good measure. Many of the cultures covered by Fagan were actually covered in Diamond's more detailed book. Fagan looks at the time of the Medieval Warming Period, approximately from 800 AD to 1300 AD, and the effects of this slightly warmer time on numerous societies, including Western Europe, the Mongols, the Inuit, the P