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| Cover art by ? |
| TALES OF A HOT PLANET William McPherson CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, September 2012 |
Rating: 3.0 Fair |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-4974-0711-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-4974-0711-7 | 83pp. | SC | $9.99 | |
Like the parable1 by Oreskes and Conway, this fictional warning was written in 2012. Like that work, it projects a future history in which, despite great efforts, the effects of climate change were not successfully controlled and human civilization eventually collapsed.
It is divided into three parts. I'll let Dr. McPherson describe them.
The first part, "Political Heat," uses existing views of denial ideologues to construct a roman a clef of political reactions to climate change. It leads to a conclusion that politicians will have to deal with the consequences of climate change, regardless of their assumptions and beliefs going into the heat of battle. The second part, "What Needs to be Done," portrays a group of world leaders who have to manage an immediate crisis of climate change effects. It outlines a number of areas, including transportation, buildings, energy and forests, that will be addressed in any necessary response to climate change. The third part, "A Hot Planet," describes what might ensue when the policies and programs described in the second part fail to stop global warming. It describes five types of geoengineering: carbon trees, desalination, iron sulfates in the oceans, cloud seeding, and aerosols. – Page 4 |
Dr. McPherson is described as a retired environmental diplomat. He participates with 24 other pople as a featured staff member in the "Climate Abandoned" Web site.2 Another staff member, Jill Cody, has produced the companion book Climate Abandoned, available on Amazon.3 Dr. McPherson has another book, Ideology Versus Science: Climate Change Denial, published January 2014.4
Here, he gets the facts largely correct. (I would question his assumption that individual drivers of cars and trucks would easily take to models which pull their power from overhead cables (which he calls "catenaries") via pantographs.) He omits any discussion of mirrors in space to reflect some sunlight away from Earth. However expensive, it is a real option.) He is a fan of the Toshiba 4S reactor design, but barely discusses its characteristics, and omits mention of any other fission reactors.
This is a sodium-cooled fast-spectrum reactor with a design specification of 10 MW output (and a possible upgrade to 50MW.) It is designed to be buried underground for safety. First unveiled around 2007 or 2008, it was proposed for Alaska's Galena power plant.5 However, support for the Galena project fell through at some point. The development status of 4S is unclear. It is only one of 19 small modular reactor designs proposed.6
All these designs face several challenges:
I am all for adding advanced nuclear reactor designs to the mix of carbon-free power sources. But they must first be developed and shown to work properly. Progress, based on trickles of funding, proceeds slowly.
Thematically, it is a different story. Although Dr. McPherson captures the contrarians' arguments, the narrative is bare-bones; a bit more fleshing out would have enhanced its impact immensely. There are continuity errors, as when Will G. Mack, who earlier spoke of his need to attend to his nightly radio show in DC, heads off to Oklahoma to visit with Senator Yardley with no explanation of how the show is being handled. Also, there are some apparent contradictions in time, described in my Errata list. None of these errors is fatal; all could easily be resolved with a little more attention. In short, this is a well-intentioned effort that falls short because of clumsy writing and cursory treatment of significant alternatives.
For those of you who are not literary lions, a "roman a clef" is a novel intended to comment on contemporary events in such a way that the real people involved can be identified without much trouble. In Tales of a Hot Planet, I could make this identification easily for Senator John Yardley ("a conservative Senator from an oil state"), Michael Marcona ("former chief of staff for Senator Yardley"), Reinhardt Miller (a Berkeley physicist and researcher for the "Berkeley Earth Temperature project"), and the Cook brothers. Similarly for Jim Bart and the Midland Institute: the real-world counterparts of both were easy to identify. However, Will G. Mack, commentator for the Vulpes Network, defeated me — although "Vulpes Network" was easy to figure out.
So, to sum up, Tales of a Hot Planet is an interesting but mediocre work that can be passed over without great loss.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.