Customer Reviews

General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization

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This book is a comprehensive introduction to energetics. The book takes the view that energy balance calculations are useful predictors of biological population dynamics. There is first a review of the current terrestrial energy provided by the sun and the earth (the earth's core is very hot). This may seem like a simple topic, but there are an enormous number of ways energy reveals itself for measurement, so a third of the book is devoted to this subject.

The middle third considers the energy balance implications of various plant and animal populations. The final third considers the human energy balance.

I would have liked to have seen consideration of power-law distributions of energy consumption by population group, but this omission doesn't subtract from the value of the book.