| TIPPING POINT FOR PLANET EARTH: How Close Are We To the Edge? Anthony D. Barnosky & Elizabeth A. Hadly New York: Thomas Dunne Books, April 2016 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-250-05115-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-250-05115-0 | 264pp. | HC | $25.99 | |
| Page 16: | "People who study tipping points for a living have a name for crossing those thresholds of no return — the system is said to exhibit 'hysteresis'. The resulting irreversible kinds of state-changes become more and more likely as the complex system gets, well, more and more complex." |
| Vocabulary: This is a definition of "hysteresis" I never heard. It's commonly defined as the lag in a system of the response behind the stimulus. That checks with the one I understood professionally, working with TTL logic circuits: how the output of a flip-flop would stay in one state as the input rose, until it suddenly jumped from one "rail" to the other: that is, from near zero volts to near the supply voltage, 5 Volts. |
| Page 62: | "It could also have coltan from Africa." |
| Vocabulary: This is a term I was unfamiliar with, although I was a rockhound in my youth. It's the colloquial name for columbite-tantalite, two minerals often found together. They are the ores of niobium (formerly columbium) and tantalum, respectively. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the best source. |
| Page 85: | "To Earth, life itself is a newcomer: for more than half of the four and a half billion years it's been circling the sun, our planet was a big, sterile rock devoid of living things..." |
| This is controversial (though life is generally agreed to have arisen longer ago than 3.5 billion years, and possibly 4.28 billion years ago. |
| Page 180: | "Ebola is horrific because of the way it kills and because it is so highly contagious, so highly virulent, and there is no vaccine or cure." |
| This is not quite true. Three promising ebola vaccines underwent field trials during the 2014-2016 outbreak in Africa. |
| Page 245: | "As he points out in his book The Ecology of Happiness (University of Chicago Press, 2009), about 20 percent of us are 'altruists'..." |
| The actual title is An Ecology of Happiness. |
| Page 246: | "Now Emma is back from stints in France, Spain, and Latin America, and Clara is studying in London. Neither aim to become scientists; both want to become global communicators." |
| Grammar: S/B "Neither aims to become a scientist". |
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