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| Cover art by Colin Anderson |
| THE COLLAPSE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION A View from the Future Naomi Oreskes Erik M. Conway New York: Columbia University Press, July 2014 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-231-16954-7 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-231-16954-X | 89pp. | SC/SF | $9.95 | |
| Page 8: | "In 2010, record-breaking summer heat and fires killed more than 50,000 people in Russia and resulted in more than $15 billion (in 2009 USD) in damages." |
| The use of United States year-2009 dollars is suspect. Most such figures would be converted to the value for the writer's current year. Also, since the USA has collapsed, I would expect at the least to see some initial conversion factor from the local (in time & space) currency to USD, with a following note that USD would be used because [reasons]. |
| Page 8: | "The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among wealthy Westerners..." |
| The reasons for this loss should be explained better. |
| Page 11: | "A crucial but under-studied incident was the legal seizing of notes from scientists who had documented the damage caused by a famous oil spill of the period, the 2011 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon." |
| Date error: S/B "2010" (April 2010, to be specific.) |
| Page 13: | "The most enduring literary work of this time is the celebrated science 'fiction' trilogy by an American writer Kim Stanley Robinson..." |
| Punctuation, wording: S/B "science fiction trilogy by American writer". If the work is science fiction when written, it remains science fiction; and Robinson should be described as "American writer" or "an American writer named". |
| Page 17: | "...the standards of Fisherian statistics..." |
| What? The which? |
| Page 19: | "US shale gas production at that time was less than 5 trillion cubic feet (Tcf, with 'feet' an archaic imperial unit roughly equal to a third of a meter) per annum." |
| Now this is more like it: The old unit of measure is used but explained in modern terms. |
| Page 27: | "As a first step, ICCEP launched the International Aerosol Injection Climate Engineering Project (IAICEP, pronounced ay-yi-yi-sep) in 2052." |
| I presume this was located on the Hi-Yi-Yi Archipelago (where once the flower-faced snouters bloomed.) |
| Page 27: | "...at a rate of approximately 2.0 teragrams per year..." |
| Capitalization: S/B "2.0 Teragrams". |
| Page 33: | "...provided Ishikawa with the necessary resources and then turned a blind eye toward its dangerous and uncertain character." |
| Missing words: S/B "toward the dangerous and uncertain character of her experiment". |
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