| THE WEATHER OF THE FUTURE Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet Heidi Cullen New York: HarperCollins, August 2010 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-06-172688-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-06-172688-5 | 329pp. | HC/GSI | $25.99 | |
| Page 12: | "Here's something that most climate scientists won't tell you about climate change: the Earth is going to be fine." |
| I imagine all of them would tell you that. It's bloody obvious. |
| Pages 15-16: | "...[scientists] wanted to do something a little better than a Viking myth about an ice giant. They wanted to use the tools of science to build a rigorous explanation that could stand the test of time." |
| This is true, but putting it that way seems condescending somehow. |
| Page 30: | "In fact, the CO2 concentration is now higher than any seen in at least the past 800,000 years—and probably many millions of years before the earliest ice core measurements." |
| As well as being vague, this is too imprecise to be supported. |
| Page 38: | "...we can easily predict that July will be hotter than January." |
| This doesn't account for the southern hemisphere. Make it "whether" to fix that. |
| Page 45: | "In fact, there isn't a single model that is able to produce a trend comparable to what we can see in the real world. Houston, we have a problem." |
| I'm concerned that this doen't make it explicit enough that these models use only natural forcings. Deniers could make good use of that statement as it stands. Make it "there isn't a single model using only natural forcings". |
| Page 49: | "The forecasts that the models lay out is dire, and even though we don't see them every night on our local news, we can't ignore it." |
| Two errors of number: S/B "are" and "them". |
| Page 81: | The table shows predictions of temperature in degrees Fahrenheit for Niamey, Niger in January & July of 2050 and 2090 under two emissions scenarios, versus today's June and July temperatures there." |
| The units are not shown, and the table does not make it clear that these numbers are temperatures. (Also, I think the January temperatures should be grouped together. More about this below.) |
| Pages 98-9: | "This seemingly modest increase in baseline temperatures has been sufficient to take corals over the bleaching threshold in 1998, 2002, and again in 2006." |
| Judging by the previous text, this last year should be "2009". |
| Page 101: | "If atmospheric CO2 concentrations reach 800ppm, pH is predicted to rise an additional 0.3 to 0.4 pH unit." |
| Since the oceans are going from alkaline toward acid, this S/B "fall". |
| Page 106: | "...parts of Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste, and the Solomon Islands..." |
| This is East Timor in French; I believe it S/B "Timor L'Este". |
| Page 110: | Because it follows the author's standard format, This table of predicted Great Barrier Reef temperatures is confusing because it fails to take into account that January is the southern hemisphere summer. |
| Also, it shares the shortcomings of all the other predictions for various regions. Here is how I think the GBR table should look: |
| TOWNSVILLE, AUSTRALIA | JULY (Winter) | JANUARY (Summer) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emissions Scenario | Today | 2050 | 2090 | Today | 2050 | 2090 |
| High | 65.3 | 68.1 | 71.1 | 81.4 | 83.8 | 87.0 |
| Low | 65.3 | 67.4 | 68.5 | 81.4 | 83.3 | 84.5 |
| Page 132: | Ellen Hanak quote: "The peripheral canal decouples the management of water for humans with the water for the Delta ecosystem." |
| Usage: S/B "from". |
| Pages 167-8: | "One reason has to do with the fact that the air in the Arctic holds less moisture (because it's so cold). Because of this lack of moisture, a greater fraction of the energy that comes from increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases can go directly into warming the atmosphere. In places that are more humid, such as the tropics, the energy is split between warming the air and evaporating the moisture." |
| This explanation makes no sense. Moisture in the air is already vapor. Evaporation of liquid water takes place in the Arctic as well as in the tropics. The author must mean that the Arctic air saturates more quickly with water vapor; after that point, all the energy goes into warming the air. But that fails, too: warmer air, again, holds more water vapor. |
| Page 180: | "Of course, GRACE, which is able to measure changes as small as the width of a human hair, is doing it (as noted above) with high precision..." |
| Missing word: S/B "distance changes as small as the width of a human hair". |
| Page 187: | " '. . . During the Eemian, carbon dioxide was definitely lower than today, a lot lower than today.' says Petrenko." |
| Since the Eemian was warmer than today, this is backward. It even contradicts what Petrenko ways in the previous sentence. S/B "higher". |
| Page 188: | The second table departs from the author's usual (vague) designation of enissions scenarios by using A2 and B1 instead of "higher" and "lower". |
| This should be consistent throughout. |
| Page 192: | "There were countless attempts to find clever ways to keep the permafrost frozen, including refrigerated slabs and insulated carpets. But in the end chemistry always won. The heat was unstoppable." |
| S/B "physics". |
| Page 192: | "The year 2040 was when climate scientists had collectively predicted the Arctic would be fully ice-free in summer." |
| Usage: S/B "year 2040 was the target year for scientists' collective prediction that". Less awkward rephrasings are possible. |
| Page 193: | "The first major oil spill..." |
| From an empty container ship? I suppose a spill of the ship's fuel oil could be considered major, but the type of spill should be spelled out. It's not like this was a tanker hauling crude. |
| Page 209: | "...the likelihood that they will be disappearing by the year 2035, and perhaps sooner, is very high." |
| Uh-oh; she's quoting the mistaken IPCC date from an erroneous WWF story in the "grey literature." |
| Page 218: | "The government says the country's power-generating capacity is at a maximum, 4,000 megawatts, which covers only 35 percent of the total population." |
| This 35 percent figure was quoted on page 206 as well. Is it really the same for the capital of Dhaka as for Bangladesh as a whole? Or am I misreading the sentence on page 206? (Also, S/B "4,000 Megawatts".) |
| Page 220: | "Every few minutes the chemistry of global warming showed off its handiwork..." |
| Again, S/B "physics". |
| Page 233: | "Even with the scenario involving modest greenhouse gas emissions, known as A1B (see the accompanying table), high temperatures will steadily go up..." |
| Which table would that be? There is a table on the next page, but it doesn't mention A1B anywhere. This book needs a common definition of what the scenarios mean throughout, and a consistent way of using them in temperature forecasts. |
| Page 243: | "New York uses about 1.060 million gallons of water per day (mgd). (In more familiar terms, this is 1.06 billion.) But demand can easily rise to more than 2,000 mgd (2 billion) during heat waves." |
| There's no need to keep doing this easy conversion for the reader, as she does here and on page 244. In fact, I see no reason to use the mgd values at all: just give consumption in billions of gallons. (And "mgd" S/B "mgpd". This continues the habit of incomplete acronyms and abbreviations. For example, the New York City Climate Change Panel is "NCCP".) |
| Page 278: | In Appendix 1, the values in the temperature tables for 2005 and 2006 are identical. |
| This is obviously a mistaken duplication of one year's data — but which one? |
| Page 314: | The Acknowledgements mention J. P. Steffensen and Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen, but not Jeff Severinghaus, who worked with them in Greenland and is also quoted extensively on pages 183-88. |
| Unless there is some private reason for this, it's a plain oversight. And it's hard to imagine a reason that would justify it but still not cause the author to write him out of the book entirely. |
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