Customer Reviews

The Sky's Not Falling!: Why It's OK to Chill About Global Warming

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

Holly Fretwell's "The Sky's Not Falling!" is a highly controversial book about global warming. Before writing this review, I decided to read some of the controversial comments here. One of the more colorful comments was:

"If you are a charter member of the 'Flat Earth Society,' or, if you just like teaching your child to bury his or her head in the sand like an ostrich, this book is for you."

I had to wonder if these people actual read the book. Did they base these comments on burbs posted on the Internet about the book? The reason I ask is no where in the book did the author suggest a stick-your-head-in-the-sand approach to this environmental issue. She acknowledges this problem and more.

This author suggests that instead of making fear-based decisions, we use education and innovation to find workable solutions. In the book she says "Many people are in a frenzy over global warming. They believe government can solve the problem if we just hand over more power and money." She disagrees. "If we're going to find a way to `solve' global warming or any other environmental problem, the answer will come from people who have enough time, energy, money, and freedom to use their creativity to solve the problem. It will not come from some governmental agency funded with lots of tax dollars."

"The Sky's Not Falling!" not only discusses environmental issues, but also covers enviropreneurship with six thought provoking exercises to assist the next generation in finding a positive approach to working on a solution. If you've never heard the term, enviropreneur is a person who finds creative or insightful ways to turn environmental problems into assets.

In the very back, there are five pages listing references. She encourages the reader to research. Knowledge is power and her belief is clear. "Human innovation and creativity have already changed the world for the better countless times...and they will again."

A good place to begin a conversation especially if you want your child to be a thoughtful, slightly skeptical consumer. Helps them to understand that everything that is published is not necessarily true. Children need to learn to how to seek out facts, evidence and data and how to separate that out from hype, speculation, fear-mongering and marketing.

This book is a refreshing change from the usual hysterical ranting and raving we see on this issue. Children are facing the issue in school, and this book provides a well-balanced perspective. Well-written, with an engaging format and fun graphics and facts, this book educates children and adults alike.

Holly Fretwell's book has a clarity and logical simplicity without being simpleminded. I've been a science writer for a long time and I recommend that anyone who has kids 9-18 or who has contacts with kids this age try out the book on them. It's not a pirate or Star Wars thriller, but it's lively and it will spark some kids to challenge the conventional wisdom. It will also be a reliable relief to any science teacher looking for a solid non-partisan critique of current knowledge. It's a good demonstration that science is not the selective popular wisdom often found in newspapers and magazines and on television, but a process of learning.

A good example of the kind of clarity this book brings to the issue is that Fretwell acknowledges the conventional wisdom, or the alarmist view, and gives its data--such as a graph of the hockey stick spike in temperatures or of growing intensity of hurricanes. Readers say, exactly! So why isn't that convincing? Then she gives the wider context, the longer graph and readers see how the alarmists have misled people. It's good expose without being triumphal.

Finally kudos to Fretwell and/or the publisher on the format. It's easily readable, nicely illustrated, chapters the right length for short attention span kids, and nice "fun facts" in the margin--"we didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones" and "In New Zealand, belches, farts, and other gaseous emissions from cattle and sheep are a greater source of greenhouse gas than cars."

This is a book by soneone who knows kids. It's got the kind of material that a lot of kids will quote or add after, "Did you know . . . "

Holly Fretwell, The Sky's Not Falling!: Why It's OK to Chill About Global Warming (Kids Ahead, 2007)

I guess it's inevitable that any time someone writes a book critical of the currently accepted wisdom on global warming, it's going to get attacked-- doubly so if that book is written for the preteen set. (After all, one has to Think of the Children(TM)!) Predictably, the usual suspects have come flying out of the woodwork to attack Holly Fretwell's book, and predictably, the tone of many of the negative reviews makes me wonder if the critics have actually read the book. Many point to "theories [actually hypotheses, but let's not quibble] that have been debunked for years", while even the quickest skim of Fretwell's rather impressive bibliography shows a surprising number of papers written in the past couple of years, for example. Unfortunately, Fretwell has released a book that's almost a catalog of things that the knee-jerk will criticize (heaven help the writer who dares to propose that the market could ever do any good!), so even before it gets off the ground, this is a book that's almost guaranteed to be doing little other than preaching to the choir; no one who's on the fence about global warming is likely to buy it for their kids, let alone anyone who's bought wholesale into the shameless fearmongering and exaggeration that's replaced wisdom and critical thinking on the subject.

Perhaps more amusing, however, are the five-star reviews that call the book "fair and balanced." It's about as fair and balanced as Fox News (and if you truly believe Fox News is fair and balanced, then perhaps you need to read Fretwell's concluding note to parents about the importance of critical thinking). But, quite like Lomborg's excellent tome The Skeptical Environmentalist, The Sky's Not Falling! was written to counter that fearmongering and exaggeration, and it's just as unfortunate as anything else about this book that Fretwell dives into exaggeration on the other side. As with Lomborg's book, the only rational conclusion to be drawn by contrasting what's here with what's crammed down our throats every day is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and it's up to the reader to figure out where along the line that truth may lie. Fretwell, to her credit, emphasizes critical thinking and the questioning of authority explicitly, where Lomborg never did.

I don't think that The Sky's Not Falling! can be taken at face value any more than I believe the [...] spewed by radical environmentalist groups can be taken at face value (I'm still waiting for the ozone layer to be gone-- oh, wait, it's past 1990?), but it's refreshing to see a dissenting opinion on the topic. ***

I heard about this book at a global warming skeptical web site. Based on reviews here it is
very controversial, enough so that I decided to read it. Based on my experience, I believe some
of the negative reviews here did not involve reading the book. I suspected I would not want
to own the book, so I asked my local library for it. It took several weeks to get a copy to
this affluent town near Boston. It came from a small college library in central Pennsylvania.
There are probably more copies of the Al Gore film in this town than copies of the book in the
whole state. The alarmists need not fear this small burst of truth.

The book is as much about critical thinking and the power of the free enterprise system as it
is about climate change. The author takes a few graphs from the alarmist literature and shows
them again, with all the data for earlier years. With all the data, the scary trend disappears.
Several reviews have claimed the book is full of errors. I only noticed one, but it was repeated
several times. Fretwell seems to think Homo Sapiens has been around only about 50,000 years.
No one knows, for sure, but most estimates are about 100,000 years or up to 500,000 years.
She never uses the number for anything more than "a long time ago" so the "mistake" is not
important.

Educators, as opposed to propagandists, should cover both sides of the climate change debate.
The science is really not settled, and popularity is not the way to settle it. Since "An
Inconvenient Truth" is being shown to kids in schools, this book should also be used, at least
until something better comes along.

Aimed at children 12-14 years old, this book is a good antidote to the far greater number of books on global warming intended to scare the daylights out of children (and maybe their parents as well). It leads off and ends with the story of Chicken Little, a parable about a false alarm. A good word for science then appears, similar to climate scare books, but then: "Well, when studying science, we have to remember that what we discover later may disprove what we believe now. And when people are stubborn in their beliefs--like those who thought the earth was the center of the universe--it's difficult to convince them they're wrong, even when new information appears. Some people believe that humans are causing our planet to warm up, and they can sometimes be very stubborn in their beliefs. But we need to do more studying about our climate before we conclude that this is the case." (pp2-3)

Then weather and climate are distinguished. The natural cycles are explained. Limitations of computer models are given. The atmosphere's composition is discussed with the key comment missing from all the climate scare books: "Water vapor is the most common greenhouse gas, which makes up 95 percent of all greenhouse gases." (p15) Sources and sinks of carbon dioxide are given with a diagram. The lack of correlation between CO2 levels and warming is shown, as is the warming on Mars, where humans are not contributing much at all. Warming by the sun and amount of cosmic rays is given. Effects on animal life include the fact that polar bears survived several warmings and coolings, and that a famous photo of bears on floating ice, supposedly in distress, was deliberately misleading.

A new direction is taken that will warm Libertarians' hearts: how free enterprise and free markets make adaptation better than totaly government controlled markets, with the failed Soviet Union as the prime example. The Kyoto Treaty on limitation of CO2 emissions is discussed as not likely to slow warming. Alternative energy sources are discussed well, noting the high cost of many of them. The safety of nuclear power plants in India, China, Japan and France is cited.

Then a whole section describes something like Henry Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson of 1946, which explains that any money devoted to something that seems desirable cannot be used for other things that may be more desirable. A child's example is given, then the results of an economics summit in 2004 (p91) with most and least desirable ways to spend $50 billion worldwide. An error here will be described later. The concept of a child becoming an Enviropreneur is raised with good-for-the-Earth inventions from the private sector as a good career goal for a child. An example of the opposite was all the problems of government-forced use of ethanol in gasoline in the USA, which has technical problems, raised the cost of food, and does not really limit CO2 much.

Some of the tricks of the climate scare trade are shown, including graphs of hurricane frequency and intensity cut off to hide more intense earlier periods, and temperature graphs cut off to hide warmer periods in antiquity, and flaws in the infamous Hockey Stick graph of Michael Mann, still used to scare audiences. Very plausible reasons for the melting glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro are given (pp108-9).

There are little cartoons and fun facts in the margins of the black and white book, many fun facts too, and some reasonable references. It took me just 2 hours to read it.

But excellence is not perfection. There were some problems. One of the best non-correlations of CO2 with warming is 90,000 direct chemical assays of CO2 between 1812 and 1965, and they show that there were 3 times when CO2 levels were higher than now, following, not leading, warming periods. This was entirely missing, and alone demolishes Kyoto. The composition of the atmosphere is incorrect and would add up to 103%. The tiny amounts of gases other than oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor and argon are not given. The two largest ice sheets in the world, Greenland and Antarctica, are not below sea level. Smaller and lighter cars from the first fuel consumption standards (CAFE) have not led to more fatalities, as improved structures, safety belt improvements, and air bags have helped, and especially all those median barriers that prevent T-bone and head-on collisions on highways. Replacement of the old big station wagon was not by SUV for many years, but by minivan, which did use less fuel. Nuclear reactors get their power from the mass lost by fission (splitting) of U-235 atoms, not from their fragments (p71). The economists' list of best things to do had as #1 the control of HIV/AIDS (p91). Actually, many reliable scientists have shown that HIV does not cause AIDS, and there is no epidemic. See: http://www.jpands.org/jpands1204.htm p121

While author Fretwell gave a great example that breathing emits CO2, and that calling this essential plant fertilizer a pollutant is idiotic, she did not recognize the great strides, especially in the USA and Europe, in reduction of real pollution (carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, formaldehyde, particulates). So the total disappearance of all cars and the cleaner factories would not improve our air quality in any meaningful way.

Bottom line, this is an excellent book, despite the minor errors, to have children read to counter the climate scare books, movies, TV shows, etc., by which most children in the USA have been abused. Librarians who choose children's books should pick this instead of the more common climate scare books, or if too pressured to do that, in addition to them.

I bought one copy of "The Sky's Not Falling" to read. I was so impressed by its emphasis on teaching kids to think and question and to look at real data from the past vs. future predictions based entirely on models that I bought three more copies and donated all four to my local library so that each branch could have its own copy. The library had only ordered Laurie David's book. Delivery of that was delayed; perhaps by Scholastic's own admission that they had to correct factual errors in Laurie David's book.

In this little volume, author Holly Fretwell has managed quite a feat. She has condensed the oftentimes confusing subject of climate change into a work detailed and in-depth enough for adults, but fun and accessible enough for kids. At the same time, she has avoided the extremes of both sides of this hotly contested issue, focusing on the science while ignoring the rhetoric. Finally, if you are a parent, you will love the great graphics and amusing fun facts.

Critical thinking is what we are supposed to teach our kids. They need to know how to do research a topic and defend their position in a debate. Most of the 1-star reviewers here seem to never have read this book and yet they felt compelled to comment on it. Is it ignorance or orchestrated effort to silence a different opinion? I believe it's both and funny thing about it is that the lunatics on the left always preach tolerance, diversity and inclusion. Would you come to this conclusion reading their reviews? That should tell all of the readers something.
Let's stop this dishonest game and allow of the ideas to the marketplace...unless you are afraid of competition.