Customer Reviews

The End: Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival

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

 

 

This book was originally published by Viking Canada as "Dangerous World". It was then published in the United States as "The End", with all metric units of measurement converted to US customary units, but with some errors. I glanced at "The End" at a public library, and happened to notice an outrageous claim about the 1816 Tambora eruption. I suspected there was error in the conversion of units for the US edition. I procured a used copy of the Canadian "Dangerous World", and was able to make the following comparison:

Canadian "Dangerous World", page 154:

"The noise was heard more than 1,500 kilometers away, and about 150 cubic kilometers of rock was hurled into the sky, reducing the height of the mountain itself by 1,280 meters".

"The annual temperatures recorded at Yale for 1816 showed temperatures a full 7 degrees Celsius below the norm."


US "The End", page 154:

"The noise was heard more than 900 miles away, and about 36 cubic miles of rock was hurled into the sky, reducing the height of the mountain itself by 4,200 feet."

"The annual temperatures recorded at Yale for 1816 showed temperatures 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit below the norm".

The first sentence is translated correctly. In the second sentence, though 7 degrees Celsius is 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 7 degrees Celsius below the norm is 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit below the norm. A similar error appears on page 156.

The table on page 110 has some severe errors. The Canadian edition correctly cites NASA data (metric) for current impact risks from comets and asteroids. But the table in the US edition lists, for example, that a diameter of 140 meters is 87 miles!

There may be more errors in "The End", but I am not going to read it.

I certainly support the right of private publishers in the US to publish with units of measurements of their choosing. But even if translated correctly, a US consumer of typical scientific literacy ought not to need US customary units. Given the outrageous errors in the US edition, I strongly recommend against reading it. Oddly, Time Magazine gave "The End" a positive review.

By the way, the book "Tales of the Earth" reproduces a graph from Stommel and Stommel (1983) that shows 1816 Yale temperatures to be 7 degrees Fahrenheit below the norm, so the Canadian edition may be erroneous in its claim of "7 degrees Celsius below the norm".

"The Lord gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time."

There's a lot of interesting information here marred, as others have noted, by some very distracted editing. De Villiers got a lot of the numbers confused, but his depiction of the dangers our planet faces from the forces of nature within, on, and beyond the earth is right on. Combining a historical perspective with analysis and extrapolation to the future, de Villiers makes it clear that within the lifetime of most people living today, the earth will suffer some horrendous catastrophe. So stay tuned.

De Villiers begins with "Doomsday as a State of Mind" (Chapter One, Part One). He mentions ancient myths (most cultures have a flood story), the "Left Behind" Rapture of some fundamentalist Christians, the "doomsday clock" of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the pronouncements of Royal Astronomer Sir Martin Rees (see my review of "Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century" at Amazon), the intriguing Bayes's theorem-based "Doomsday Argument" (see pages 16-17), etc., making it clear that "The end of the world is always nigh." (p 10).

He didn't mention Chicken Little, but I will. The sky really is falling, or something is falling out the sky or will, and the earth will open up and swallow people and things and/or shake us senseless, or the earth will belch and fill the sky with soot and ash, darkening the planet into a long winter not seen since the days of the dinosaurs, and/or a rock the size of Manhattan will smack into the planet with the force of a few million atomic bombs, etc. The really scary thing about all this is IT WILL HAPPEN.

At least that is the impression I got from reading de Villiers's strangely non-sensational prose. Compared to Bill McGuire's tone in A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know (see my review at Amazon) de Villiers is downright matter of fact. And why not? Most of the really horrendous horrors to come fall into the category of "we didn't see it coming, and there was nothing we could have done about it anyway," (the caldera at Yellowstone National Park blowing its top--and what a top it will be--is an example) and, yes, some or a lot of the living will envy the dead.

In Part Two, de Villiers provides a "Context" for understanding just what has happened and what will happen to our beloved planet as he reprises ice ages and mass extinctions. In Part Three he gives a catastrophe by catastrophe rundown on specifically what has and will happen: Near Earth Objects, comets and asteroids, becoming fused earth objects; earthquakes; volcanoes; poisonous emissions and noxious gases; tsunamis traveling at over 500 miles an hour; various floods; cyclones and tornadoes, plagues and pandemics. In Part Four de Villiers looks at humans making things worse and examines what can be done.

If any of this should depress you, consider this: given a long enough view not only are we all dead, but so is the planet even if we have to wait five billion years for the sun to swell and explode. What is more, even if we somehow avoid that fate by traveling to distant worlds, it is unlikely that we could dodge or shield ourselves from all the gamma ray emitting stars or the supernovae lurking about. Finally, even if we avoided all cosmic calamities, the heat death of the universe would eventually do us in.

So let's take the whimsical view of Robert Frost in his poem, "Fire and Ice":

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

I've actually enjoyed reading this book, which makes it a shame that I must give it a rather dismal review. Aside from the errors already noted by other reviewers, I would add the following.

1) The diameter of the Earth is not 24 miles.
2) Marc Antony was not one of the conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar.
3) The River that burned in Cleveland, Ohio was the Cuyahoga, not the Cayuga.
4) The topic of whether a Benevolent God is compatible with our understanding of the universe either deserves a chapter by itself, or else should be left unmentioned.

The book is an interesting compilation of facts about a variety of threats to the earth and its inhabitants. But the multiple errors in the text work to undermine trust in the author, without which the book loses its affect.

This is my area of professional focus and I find the book nice enough to read, but middle of the road in terms of insight and analysis. It is for the most part a synthesis of others' work. That can be a good thing, but there are problems.

I agree with the other reviewer that gave it one star because of the huge problems converting from metric to US/English units. It makes for some outlandish claims that many may not know are wrong.

There is also borderline plagiarism from at least one other source. Page 300 quotes extensively from an article in Nature. The first part is appropriately quoted, but the following text continues to barely re-write the original author's text, as pasted below.

Original article:
"Catastrophes are not average; they are the great exceptions....It is the fact that they are rare and exceptional that makes it very hard to plan for natural disasters. Problems that crop up less than once a generation -- even, in some cases, less than once a millennium -- are easily overlooked. Experts can anticipate some natural disasters, but their predictions and assessments often count for little compared with the pressures of population and development, which increase the number of people in harm's way."

Villiers uncited re-write in the book: (page 276 of hardback)
"That disasters are rare, the great exceptions, makes planning for them difficult. It is easy to overlook something that might happen only once in a generation, and sometimes less frequently than that. Historical memories are short, particularly in the face of population and development pressures."