Customer Reviews

Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry about Global Warming

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I must first apologize for not actually having read the book in question, but I must disagree with the reviewer from stanford. He or she states that rises in co2 concentrations will change internal concentrations of c:n:p ratios in plants, that's simply not true. algae maintain a ratio of 106:50:1 (the redfield ratio) in the ocean that has a 800:50:1 ratio...in all the studies with increased co2 content, no plants have increased c:n:p ratios. For a c:n:p ratio to be effected, there must be a change of n or p contents, neither of which are absorbed from the atmosphere for plant use (n only marginally). Of course plants will benefit from increased co2, co2 is the source of sugars, and the metabolism will be sped up, but that will not decrease a plant's lifecycle, a maximal photosynthetic level is controlled ultimately but rubisco, a protein, and photosynthetic rates cannot exceed that level, a plant's life cycle is not analogous to a candle, which will burn brighter and therefore shorter. if anything the maximal photosynthetic rate, a result of additional co2 will cause delayed blooming and a prolonged existence. As for your other statements, I cannot agree or disagree with them as i do not have enough information, but I cannot stand by and watch irresponsible or uninformed reporting of science. Physiologically what you described as a plant's reaction to increased co2 has never been validated in any tests in any journals and our knowledge of plant physiology simply does not allow your scenario to take place.

This book by Moore provides some much needed balance in the greenhouse debate. He does not claim to be a scientist, and provides a cursory, high-level examination of the science behind the issue, current up to the published date. He says that global warming is real, but nowhere near the catastrophic estimates often thrown about. This section of the book I found to be satisfactory, but lacking in hard data and citations. As a graduate student of Atmospheric Physics, I would have preferred more numbers.

Aside from some vagueness and inconsistencies in pre-historical dates (which are mostly impossible to pinpoint anyway) the science is bang on. Although the climate is getting warmer, it is incorrect to assume that humans are the cause. The net anthropogenic effect on the atmospheric temperature is unknown. We can't say, with any degree of certainty, whether it is positive or negative. Although many well-educated people perceive greenhouse warming to be a problem, those closest to the issue (actually studying atmospheric radiative transfer) are reserving judgment. The public reaction to greenhouse alarms is probably due to the recent DDT and CFC scares. However, where alarm was needed for these issues, it is unnecessary and misguided when regarding the greenhouse issue.

Most of the book is dedicated to an analysis of the situation from the perspective of an economist, which happens to be Moore's occupation. Longer growing seasons, more arable land in northern regions, and less energy expended on heating are three of the more obvious benefits.

That Moore's book was published by the Cato Institute does not affect the science contained within. Proposed measures to limit CO2 emissions go against the Cato Institute's free market philosophy, so they clearly have an interest in opposing such measures. It is the very same as an environmental scientist, ecologist or a biologist without a clear understanding of atmospheric science raising alarms about global warming in an effort to maintain their funding. Personally, I don't care for the Cato Institute's capitalistic philosophies, but as long as the science is solid I see no valid reason to criticize a book simply because they publish it.

I ordered this book amongst others some of whom take differing points of view. I am still gathering information. But, I can tell you that this book at least gives some balance to the basic hysteria that generally comes along with this topic.

If we were all worrying about what to do about volcanos, what sort of discourse would we have? Could we have? Is it possible that this topic of global warming is no different? Those that point to near term data as a problem should learn that this trend did not start a few years ago but many, many before the industrial revolution...this is in spite of data that shows a nice trend line up over the past recent decades. Actually, both the temperature and CO2 have been very high and very low and very high again all without the help of GM, FORD or CON ED.

This is certainly a complex subject and frankly other than reducing obvious sources of air pollution that are a different subset of worries and worth the effort, global warming is a political topic, not a scientific one.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed.." HL Mencken. I purchased this as a group of books and sources to study differing perspectives and gain deeper information on global warming.

This book is written by an economist, who asks the questions of cost benefit of different courses of action. In chapter 1 he points out that there is not agreement on global warming. Claims regarding man made global warming often use poor science, weak theories, and forced models. But, if we accept global warming, what will be the cost benefits of various courses of action.

A major point is the economic costs to USA jobs to achieve the proposed actions to cut CO2. Kyoto does not include China, India, Brazil, Mexico..... As costs go up in the USA, companies will move production to China (not covered by Kyoto) for even lower costs. Net, there would be no global environmental benefit other than eliminating USA jobs. Kyoto is an excellent proposal for China, India, Brazil, Mexico........... Setting standards to 1990 would punish the USA for its stronger growth over that of Europe since 1990. Analysis has already been completed showing base USA manufacturing industries would be significantly disadvantaged and would need to move to China, India, Brazil: automotive, iron & steel, cement, petrochemical, chemical, paper, aluminum. The Department of Energy has already reported "imports from nonparticipating countries would displace a significant amount of US industrial output and employment". One can see why the labor unions have strongly opposed Kyoto.

Points brought into question:
* What about the other green house gases, foremost water vapor
* The models being used are forced to provide predetermined results to support a political position and do not replicate current global conditions
* Often the global warming alarmist use conflicting data to make different points. One example is rainfall in global warming. The same alarmist will in one area point out global warming will lead to less rainfall, and thus poor agriculture. Yet, the same person will later site more damage due to flooding due to increased rains?
* One third of the USA CO2 comes from transportation. Are Americans really willing to cut driving?

But if we accept that the earth is warming, what are the consequences?
* Historically, people have flourished in warming times; i.e. 800-1300; when temperatures cycle down, people suffer
* Due to the science and physics, the warming will occur more in colder climates, winter, and at night.
* People prefer warmer weather -
o Where do we vacation?
o In total, people prefer warm sports over cold sports
o USA business have already been moving South
o Large percentages of people move South when they retire
o People prefer to work in warmer weather
o Lower net heating costs
* People more readily adapt to warming than cooling weather
* Health
o More people die in the cold, more die in the winter
o Health problems are worse in the colder months
o Diseases follow sanitation and control, not temperature
* Traffic & transportation
o Cold results in more accidents
o Cold increases road costs
o Warm reduces airline costs and increases reliability of travel
* Agriculture - warmer weather increases agriculture
o Longer growing seasons in warmer climates
o More CO2 increases plant output
* Marine resources increase with increasing temperatures; i.e. fishing

Net, Moore raises some very interesting points for discussion. His core point is that we should also open the discussion to the economic cost and benefits of various courses.

I have been following "global warming" for over 15 years and am dismayed by alarmists who have very little regard for real science. Most of them, like some previous reviewers of this book, are merely jumping on a (popular) bandwagon -- they have done very little research themselves.

The least accurate studies (ground-based and ocean-based) are showing mixed (!) results, with the majority supporting slight warming. By the way, have you noticed how they keep REDUCING their projections? Maybe in 20 years, they will have reduced their projections enough that they match reality.

The next most accurate are weather balloon studies, which do not show warming. This data is referred to less often than the other groups.

The most accurate are satellite studies which actually show cooling. Yes, COOLING. You'll notice that the alarmists ignore that data. They will say something like, well look at all this other data. So? Who cares how much data you have if all of it is junk?

Some say that resource-wasting corporations are behind the non-global-warming data. Not quite, but let's allow that for the moment. Who is behind the global-warming data? Government programs who want to stay alive (i.e., receive funding) and tell their researchers to find global warming (or they get shut down). Guess what. They "find" global warming. Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black.

This book provides a different perspective -- maybe global warming will be good for us. Some enticing theories, but I'm not sure I buy them (still doing more research). I gave the book 4 stars because of a lack of substantial data, but would give it 5 stars for presentation and concept.

Anyone looking for a fair presentation and discussion of the case against widespread action to control global warming, will not find it here. The author, an economist from the Hoover Institution, lays out a number of points to consider before action in limiting the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Unfortunately he denigrates his case with loaded words (e.g. Vice President Gore has divined, a media chorus . . . has fanned the fear)and too often labels Gore and others as Cassandras, hysterical, etc. In the first chapters, he discounts the prediction that a rise in global temperature is underway, and even if true, it would be good for most of us. Furthermore, we don't know the amount of the rise or its timetable anyway. A global increase is compared to the warmer weather that occurred between about 5000 and 3000 B.C. That was beneficial as an impetus to the transformation from hunter-gathering nomadic people to civilizations along the Nile and Indus rivers and elsewhere, through the development of agriculture and animal domestication. The later chapters constitute a refutation to his placement of our civilization on a par with theirs and the claim that a warming is as beneficial to us as to them. In them he presents the complex economics of today, and the many disruptions our intricate global society could face with changes in temperature. We are not like the simple rustic village societies of those prehistoric millennia, and warming or cooling could do serious financial harm to millions. The discussion of the recent Kyoto accords is particularly emotional and unacademic, and its tone is out of place in a study of this kind. Inconsistencies occur throughout the book. The author states that the Mini (Little) Ice Age began in Europe in the fourteenth century; most climatologists place it later. In the claims that coolness devastated that century, he does not mention the great plague, Europe's greatest tragedy, until much later in the book. His dates for the relative warmth of neolithic times varies by several thousand years from one chapter to another. The warm climate then produced a great rise in sea level, yet it is claimed that a similar heating would barely do so today.

In his book, Thomas Moore's argument basically boils down to this : Global warming isn't a problem, and if it is, global warming would actually be a benefit to mankind. There were several issues in this book that dismantled its credibility for me. As a student in the ecological sciences, it seemed to me that Moore's presentation of the data was at times misleading. One such example of this (of which there were many) : Moore writes that in a world enriched with C02, 95 percent of all plants would grow faster, bigger, and would utilize water more efficiently. While this is true, it is also true that the metabolism of plants would be sped up (meaning their life span would shorten) and their nutritional value would decrease (as the ratio of carbon:nitrogen:phosphorous in the plant became more weighted towards carbon). This would mean that herbivores would need to eat more of these less-nutritious plants to get enough nitrogen and phosphorous to survive. However, these important points weren't mentioned.

Another issue which I found a bit disturbing was that the author says many times that moderate global warming will most likely benefit Americans. While this may be true in his economic model, he barely mentions the severe economic impact that global warming will have on countries more dependent on agriculture which would greatly suffer from increasing desertification and those countries where much of the land would be submerged under a rising sea level. He often says statements like "Climate affects principally agriculture, forestry, and fishing, which together constitute less than 2 percent of the US gross domestic product." (p. 103) Ironically, Third World countries that rely primarily on agriculture and contribute the least to global warming are the most likely to suffer from the consequences. One of the only times in the whole book that I could find where he seriously addresses the consequences on poorer regions of the world is when he says "For some small island nations, of course, the problems could be much more severe and their hardships should be addressed." (p.104) He goes on in no further detail about this, however.

Finally, on the last flap of the book, it describes the publisher - the Cato Institute, funded primarily by corporations and individuals, which has published other similar books, some among them claiming that air pollution is not a problem and that Earth's resources are in fact not being depleted. I believe these books are highly suspect as far as scientific objectivity goes and would question which corporations and individuals are funding these books/authors and what may be their motives - to honestly seek the truth, or to deceive and confuse the public about important issues in order to further their own interests.

Out of curiosity, I recently checked the Cato Institute's annual report, and indeed Chevron, Exxon, Amoco, Unocal, and the American Petroleum Institute were among its sponsors the year this book was published.

I wrote a review for the Ronald Bailey et al. ignominious epic, "Earth Report 2000", which paints the same, optimistic, "leave the environment in the hands of multinational corporations and all will be fine with the world" picture as this tome. I am employed as a senior scientist in ecology in the Netherlands, and for the past year I have been exploring interactions between above- and below ground pathogens, herbivores, and their natural enemies. I have also been examining how processes, which are largely deterministic over large spatial and temporal scales, are mediated by largely stochastic (unpredictable) interactions amongst organisms occurring over much smaller scales. In other words, how is the processing of information, nutrients, and materials in ecosystems dependent upon the activities of individual organisms.

The essential truth is that, at present, our understanding of the link between micro-evolutionary characteristics of communities and larger scale ecosystem processes is rudimentary at best. How many species do we need to maintain the integrity of ecosystems? We don't know. Which species are the most important? We know this only completely. How much can systems be broken down in size and still function effectively? We don't know. These questions are at the heart of my profession, yet we live in very uncertain times when we - humanity - are conducting a huge, single experiment on our own life support systems. The importance of my research and that of my colleagues is that we have to put our findings within the context of global change: humanity is simplifying natural ecosystems worldwide with staggering and alarming efficiency, and yet it is these same systems which generate the conditions upon which we are utterly dependent for our existence. Emergent properties from ecosystems generate the services which nurture life and humanity: these include, purification of air and water, detoxification and decomposition of wastes, control of insect and other pests through predation, generation and preservation of soils and renewal of their fertility, pollination, dispersal of seeds, and partial control of climate. There is no technological substitute for these services - if they were to be traded on economic markets they would be literally worth trillions of dollars, but because they are "externalized" in cost-pricing scenarios, they are therefore underappreciated by society. Yet our existence hinges on the free-flow of these services.

Why do I say this here? Because Moore, someone who has utterly no understanding of these processes, has the audacity to write a book preaching the benefits of climate change without bothering to consider that they will also effect changes upon the systems which permit our survival. This is something at which many of the climate-change advocates are ignorant, while they focus on two-dimensional (linear) projections of climate change on society. Their simple answer is: "its going to be warmer, which will extend the growing season, reduce winter heating costs, and thus benefit human society". The reality is very, very different. Ecosystems and the speices within them are already facing innumerable human-induced stresses, over landscapes which have been plowed, paved, dredged, dammed, drained, slashed and burned, logged, fragmented, doused in toxic chemicals, and thus reduced greatly. Climate change is just another potential nail in the coffin. Given that the rate of climate change is far greater than in at least 160,000 years, and that organisms are having to adapt to already profoundly stressed conditions, many will not be able to adapt quickly enough and will perish. Since organisms do not exist in isolation in nature - they interact - the loss of many species dooms very many more. Peter Raven, at the Missouri Botanical Garden, estimates that for the loss of a single species of tropical plant, at least 30 (or more) species which depended on that plant species will also disappear. The main point is that the large scale biotic holocaust already underway will only be exacerbated by climate change.

So where is Moore's evidence that climate change will not effect natural communities? He provides none. There is plenty of empirical research suggesting that global warming, at current rates at least, is disrupting entire biological communities by de-synchronizing multiple-species interactions. In other words, some species respond better than others, but due to mutual dependencies the better-adapted species disappear anyway, because they may lose access to their prime resources or else phenological timing is disrupted. There is also more recent evidence suggesting that differences in climate change over variable geographical (and seasonal) scales is having a disruptive effect over the breeding success of tropical migrant birds. These studies are emerging from a relatively new area in science, but they paint a very worrying picture. And to reiterate - Moore, whose science is non-existent, neither understands nor cares to understand the impacts of climate change on natural ecosystems.

Sadly, the libertarian think-tanks also continue to reel out this trash, simply as a means of confusing the public over a matter of considerable contemporary importance. In propounding this anti-scientific rhetoric, people like Moore really have no understanding of what is at stake.

from the recent report of the National Academy of Science Committee on Climate Change: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century."

from the same report:

"Some models project an increased tendency toward drought over semi-arid regions, such as the U.S. Great Plains. Hydrologic impacts could be significant over the western United States,where much of the water supply is dependent on the amount of snow pack and the timing of the spring runoff."

but don't worry! be happy!