| SCIENCE AS A CONTACT SPORT Inside the Battle To Save Earth's Climate Stephen H. Schneider Washington: National Geographic Society, 2009 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-4262-0540-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-4262-0540-6 | 295pp. | HC/BWI | $28.00 | |
| Page 2: | "The concept of an interconnected, interdependent whole Earth system hadn't evolved beyond a few visionary thinkers." |
| I would say "hadn't expanded". |
| Page 7: | "...all predicted decades ago and now playing out at rates as fast or faster than was projected." |
| Number: S/B "were projected". |
| Page 23: | "...who asserted that biomass burning and desert dust was going to lead to cooling." |
| Number: S/B "were going". |
| Page 40: | "...be federally subsidized, to compete with the European's jet..." |
| Misplaced apostrophe: S/B "Europeans'". |
| Page 43: | "...and that is where empirical testing and peer debate comes in." |
| Number: S/B "come in". |
| Page 52: | "...coincided with the redirection of an international meteorological program called the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP)..." |
| The World According to GARP: I love it when a pun comes together. |
| Page 55: | "...and his unshakable belief that the world was cooling because of dust generated by the overgrazing and blowing soil from goats of Asia and Africa..." |
| Clumsy phrasing: S/B "the overgrazing of goats, leading to soil blowing from". |
| Page 60: | Norman Myers and his 1979 book The Sinking Ark." |
| Index: This title is not indexed, although Silent Spring is (and so is its author Rachel Carson, only as the author of the 1962 book.) |
| Page 65: | The 1979 book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth." |
| Index: This title is not indexed, although Silent Spring is (and so is its author Rachel Carson, only as the author of the 1962 book.) |
| Page 82: | "...because there's a hundred watts of energy per square meter difference between winter and summer..." |
| Nit: Watts are a unit of power. S/B "a hundred watts". |
| Page 112: | "...the Montreal Protocol, which banned about half the emissions of ozone-depleting substances, was expanded to cover about 90 percent of those substances." |
| This is vague on whether the number of substances, or their emissions volume, was banned. I believe the highlighted phrase S/B "which banned the emission of about half of ozone-depleting substances, was expanded to cover about 90 percent of those substances". |
| Page 115: | "In my submitted written testimony, I commented, 'Quite simply, the faster the climate is forced to change, the more likely there will be unexpected surprises lurking.' " |
| Redundant wording: S/B "surprises". (Most surprises are unexpected.) |
| Page 150: | "IPCC representatives [...] wanted distribution and equity to be an explicit variable." |
| Number: S/B "explicit variables". (I presume.) |
| Page 152: | "Just say what we do and don't know, and do not leave the conclusion out because it isn't well established yet. (That is policy prescriptive—an IPCC no-no.)" |
| This is unclear. Should the conclusion be left in, or taken out? |
| Page 193: | "A last-ditch attempt by Russian delegate Yuri Israel to preserve the 'dangerous anthropogenic interference' language that we had fought so hard to keep in over U.S. objections nearly prevented the final gavel..." |
| Yuri Israel, a notorious climate-change contrarian, wanted to keep this language? |
| Page 203: | "Amainstream, well-established consensus..." |
| Missing space: S/B "A mainstream". |
| Page 213: | "I gave a dozen interviews a day for several months that year." |
| A heroic effort, but this must have cut into Dr. Schneider's research and conferencing time. In fact, I suspect that this might be the one case where the good Doctor exaggerates. |
| Page 225: | "...his contention that climate change hasn't affected the Poles." |
| Capitalization: S/B "poles". |
| Page 236: | "An increase above 3 or 4 degrees Celsius (5.4 or 6.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over 1990 temperatures..." |
| Choice of conjunction: S/B "(5.4 to 6.6 degrees Fahrenheit)". The conjunction "or" won't be interpreted the same way with decimal fractions present. |
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