My academic abode is located within the National Weather Center, which houses various weather and climate organizations. Here are some excerpts from email announcements that I have received from such organizations:
''The South Central Climate Science Center bi-weekly Journal Club will meet on Thursday September 13th at 1:30PM CST in the Oklahoma Climatological Survey's conference room located on the second floor of the National Weather Center. This week's discussion will focus on "Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States." by McCright and Dunlap (2011).''
(BTW, the cool dudes that were examined don't deny carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and don't deny that climate changes).
And this announcement for the Region 6 Transportation-Climate Summit:
''BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Our transportation systems are facing increasing challenges due to extreme weather and climate variability. For example, rising seas, increasing storm severity, extreme temperature cycles, severe winter snows and droughts are creating increasing demands on infrastructure and operations."
Although the last chapter of "The Age of Global Warming: A History" is not a journal article, I highly recommend that participants in the journal club download the Kindle edition for 10 bucks and start with the last chapter. There we read a bit about the intellectual history of Vienna in the 1920s:
''Popper's search for a principle to distinguish science from pseudo-science was sparked by the contrast between Einstein's theory of relativity and Marx's theory of history, Freud's psycho-analysis and Alfred Adler's `individual psychology'. Einstein's theory was supported by passing the severe test conducted by Eddington, a test it could have failed. By contrast, subscribers to the theories of Marx, Freud and Adler found confirmatory evidence wherever they looked. Their theories seemed to explain practically everything within the fields to which they referred. Whatever happened always confirmed it.''
''Common to the three, Popper noted, was their treatment of unbelievers - or, to use the terminology of global warming, sceptics and deniers. Their defiance in the face of manifest truth had a ready explanation, for, as we've already seen, "unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still `un-analysed' and crying out for treatment."''
As other reviewers of this book have noted, the details of the diplomatic history can be difficult to follow, if you are not predisposed to remember the names of all the players. A less tedious option might be a book such as the Manga Guide to Climate Diplomacy, if such a book is ever published. However, the broad theme of the diplomatic history is not difficult to follow. The system of international governance, nurtured by the UN, has worked as designed, giving voice and power to the disenfranchised and downtrodden of our planet. The final agreement reflected the needs and desires of humanity, the quality of the science, and the discount rate that even the participants (politicians, climate scientists, NGO members included) apply in their personal lives. The international political system works. Celebrate it!
Okay ...as scientists we are not supposed to make exclamatory statements about policy decisions that are balancing needs outside our purview.
A more parochial history for us scientists is reviewed in the book, namely the various aspects of climategate. Here is one conclusion from the book: ''The prospect of planetary salvation inflated the science so it became too big to fail, justifying the anti-scientific practice of withholding data and methods from potential critics and de-legitimising critical argument.''
The book is a history book, with a lot of deep history. ''To this, scientists brought their cultural aversion to learning from the past.
For them, history is not so much a closed book as irrelevant to the problems of the future.'' I feel that claim is generally true, and this aversion is nurtured by the system of higher education that I am familiar with. From freshman year to the Ph.D. hooding ceremony in the football stadium, the only historical knowledge required is what is needed to pass a token undergraduate history requirement, generally regarded as a joke. I hear no lament about this where I work. The grumbling I heard was about Laplace Transforms being dropped from the undergraduate curriculum.
But it has all happened before. Here is one gem of historical analysis within the book:
''In medicine what matters is not the motive of the practitioner but the efficacy of the therapy. A century ago, Professor Lawrence Henderson of Harvard drew attention to the remarkable advances in medical science, technology and therapy. 1912, Henderson claimed, marked a `Great Divide' when `for the first time in human history, a random patient with a random disease consulting a doctor chosen at random stands a better than fifty-fifty chance of benefiting from the encounter'.''
''When did reputable doctors retrospectively become quacks and when did clinical interventions, based on the medical science of the day, become of net benefit to patients? Even with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to know. One answer is certainly wrong - at doctors' evaluation of their own abilities. Good intentions and strength of belief are highly misleading indicators of the quality of scientific knowledge. Physicians had been swearing the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm for twenty-three centuries prior to Henderson's Great Divide.''
Here is one error that I found in the book: ''By the end of the twentieth century, the Milanković cycles had fallen out of favour. Scientists now favoured theories that explained climate change in terms of changes in the atmosphere.'' Milanković cycles are not out of favour for predicting climate changes on time scales of 10,000 years or more.
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To understand the politics of global warming, it is absolutely necessary to have knowledge of the players, related organizations and events, as they played out chronologically on the world stage. This book will provide those elements, as well as context. If believing in man made climate change is important for you, this book is not for you. It is heavily fact based as regards who or what, did what and when. Much of what the book lays out can be easily verified. Does the author have a position? Yes. It is, however, reached as a result of his research of the public record. Importantly, his thoughts in this regard, are not made in a manner of hard sell. In fact, they are secondary to the books purpose. Some persons are of the mind that no one absent a degree in a related science, should speak on a subject such as global warming. That is absurd on its face. Regardless, this book is, as stated, a history of events. It is far more based on a traditional journalistic approach than a scientific work. Read with an open mind, your reward will be a historical perspective of the age of global warming.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 7, 2014
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 29, 2014
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 21, 2022
To understand the politics of global warming, it is absolutely necessary to have knowledge of the players, related organizations and events, as they played out chronologically on the world stage. This book will provide those elements, as well as context. If believing in man made climate change is important for you, this book is not for you. It is heavily fact based as regards who or what, did what and when. Much of what the book lays out can be easily verified. Does the author have a position? Yes. It is, however, reached as a result of his research of the public record. Importantly, his thoughts in this regard, are not made in a manner of hard sell. In fact, they are secondary to the books purpose. Some persons are of the mind that no one absent a degree in a related science, should speak on a subject such as global warming. That is absurd on its face. Regardless, this book is, as stated, a history of events. It is far more based on a traditional journalistic approach than a scientific work. Read with an open mind, your reward will be a historical perspective of the age of global warming.
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Amazon Customer
Bought this for a friend - I think he liked it! From flicking through it
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 14, 2018Introvers
Does this history really start back in Francis Bacon's time? Yes!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 23, 2014
Jorge Brown Segui
A welcome review on a biased subject
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on December 10, 2014
