 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | It’s been nearly four decades since scientists first realized that global warming posed a potential threat to our planet. Why, if we knew of the threats way back in the Carter Administration, can’t we act decisively to limit greenhouse gases, deforestation, and catastrophic warming trends? Why are we still addicted to fossil fuels? Have we all just been fiddling for 40 years as the world burns around us?
Schneider, part of the Nobel Prize–winning team that shared the accolade with Al Gore in 2007, had a front-row seat at this unfolding environmental meltdown. Piecing together events like a detective story, Schneider reveals that as expert consensus grew, well-informed activists warned of dangerous changes no one knew how to predict preciselyand special interests seized on that very uncertainty to block any effective response. He persuasively outlines a plan to avert the building threat and develop a positive, practical policy that will bring climate change back under our control, help the economy with a new generation of green energy jobs and productivity, and reduce the dependence on unreliable exporters of oiland thus ensure a future for ourselves and our planet that’s as rich with promise as our past. |
Average Customer Rating:   Probably the best book about climate change you could get Stephen Schneider has spent decades involved in the conversation about climate change. This is an optimistic, candid, human look at an issue that affects all of us by a dude with a humbling set of scientific credentials and awards. I recommend this book if you are interested in the topic and why wouldn't you be? up against the Carbon Lobby & the knuckleheads It has got to be incredibly frustrating to be Stephen Schneider or James Hansen, leading climate scientists who have been trying to educate the public on the issue of climate change for decades.
Schneider, a recipient of the 2007 collective Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), has done us a service by sharing his experience over the years as an insider in the fight to educate the public about the need to reduce carbon emissions.
In light of the latest desperate attempt by the Carbon Lobby to obfuscate reality, the hacking of the climate research center in England, Schneider helps keep things in context -- this is but the latest little chapter in a battle that's been going on since Hansen's Congressional testimony of 1988.
Of course the Carbon Lobby is not going to roll over and stop promoting their right to profit from global warming. And neither can we do anything but keep fighting for the truth and for action to make possible a livable planet for future generations. Great Book I thoroughly enjoyed this book although I would be part of the target audience.
Schneider does an excellent recap of a lot of the history and media aspects in this book however he doesn't give into the science as much as I would have hoped. That being said it I think this gives it makes this more accessible for a broader audience.
Great insider's view of the politics of climate science Steve Schneider is one of the best-known and highest-profile climate scientists, and he's been fighting in the political trenches literally for decades to get policymakers to understand and act on good science in this field. This is a fun, funny, straightforward, and easily-understood account of some of his adventures at the intersection of science, climate media, and politics. He's a real character, has a pretty wicked sense of humor, and is often very blunt in his criticisms of both the political (US, UN and IPCC) processes he's been a part of, and of US media coverage on this issue.
The book was written before the latest controversies over IPCC climate science, so Scheider doesn't address those controversies directly. But his book does describe in great detail the process by which the IPCC agrees to include statements of climate vulnerability in its summaries for policymakers, making clear that those statements represent the least-common-denominator result of negotations between both scientists and political country representatives. If anything, you come away with the conviction that the IPCC pronouncements are probably way too conservative. Some of these stories are really amazing, and you feel like you were in the closed-door meetings that Schneider has had access to for many years. Extreme Science This is a science book especially a climate science book unlike any other. The reader gets not just the outcome of the scientific debate nor the "two sides," rather Schneider immerses us in the process of science. If science is a contact sport, and from all accounts (not just this one) it is, then climate science is the Superbowl. Following Schneider on his long journey through the science left me with the following impressions.
1) It is amazing that a science that, in any organized sense, is only about forty years old has accomplished so much in such a short time span. It has involved tens of thousands of scientists from dozens of disciplines and sub-disciplines inventing a "science" in an effort to comprehend one of the most complex phenomenon ever studied (or created) by humans.
2) Climate science is a science that by its very nature involves the amassing of mountains of evidence that point towards the elimination of uncertainties and the statement of probabilities--and not to exact formulas or equations. It has to consider non-linear events, thresholds and tipping points as basic components of its understanding of the complex phenomenon we call climate.
3) Climate science has undertaken these investigations while under attack by the largest and best-funded corporations and economic interests in human history. Where there is not opposition from the fossil fuel industry and its allies, there are an untold number of economic players whose fortunes will be affected by any rearrangement of the rules of the market required by the desperate straits we have put ourselves in.
4) Climate science has been expected to come up with definitive answers as to the probability of humans changing the planet into a totally unfamiliar place in order that an international assemblage of policymakers and political leaders can arrive at a solution to this unprecedented problem and enforce it across the boundaries of 190 nations before time runs out. The goals of social justice must be matched against those of keeping the warming of the climate in check--all within a process that has imposed on itself the requirement of 100% consensus.
It is truly amazing that this gang of climate scientists has accomplished so much in such a short time-span within the political pressure cooker they operate. We owe these scientists, and Steven Schneider as their note-taker, a deep debt of gratitude for all they have done to make the world a better place. Schneider gives us an insider's view into how to compete in "extreme science." |  |
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