| PLOWS, PLAGUES, AND PETROLEUM How Humans Took Control of Climate William F. Ruddiman Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-691-12164-2 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-691-12164-8 | 202pp. | HC/GSI | $69.90 | |
| Page 5: | "Slower but steadily accumulating changes had been underway for thousands of years..." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 15: | "...yet even it is far beyond the spans of not just our individual lives but also all written history (covering little more than 2,000 years.)" |
| Too short a season: S/B more like "(covering little more than 4,500 years.)" 1 |
| Page 20: | "In nature, volcanoes are the dripping faucet that add CO2 to the atmosphere." |
| Number: S/B "that adds". |
| Page 21: | "During the last 50 million years, the slow collision of India plowing northward into Asia had created the Himalaya Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau, by far the largest feature on Earth's continents." |
| Wording: S/B "the largest feature" or "features"? |
| Page 23: | "Their brains were capable of everything ours are now, but they lacked the base of common knowledge available today. If one of their babies were somehow brought into the modern era and raised in today's society, he or she would have just as good a chance as any of us to become an astrophysicist, a carpenter, or a billionaire manufacturer of malfunctioning computer software." |
| LOL. He or she might even start a charitable foundation dedicated to alleviating sickness in developing countries. |
| Page 25: | "Ice is nature's messiest housekeeper; it carries and pushes all sizes of sediment and dumps it in great heaps wherever it melts." |
| Word order: S/B "sediment of all sizes" (to avoid number error.) |
| Page 27: | "This entire region, not very long ago, had once been much wetter." |
| "Once" is redundant. |
| Page 28: | "In summer, Earth is in the part of its orbit where it is tilted directly toward the Sun, and so the Sun appears high in the daytime sky." |
| Inaccurate: S/B "the Northern Hemisphere". |
| Page 30: | "Distance from a heat source clearly matters, and the amount of heat from a light bulb is in the general ballpark of the average amount coming from the Sun." |
| Clearly, this statement should specify some distance from the light bulb where this is true. |
| Page 40: | "The problem of dating these younger cycles..." |
| Are they younger or older? It depends on your point of view, doesn't it? |
| Page 44: | "During summer, melt water from the ice margins flowed in steams and rivers..." |
| Spelling: S/B "streams". |
| Page 56: | "...including a giant tortoise the size of a Volkswagon "bug"..." |
| Spelling: S/B "Volkswagen". |
| Page 74: | "Changes were also underway in environments far from the wooded regions of southern Eurasia." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 78: | "In contrast, less methane survives the long trip to Antarctica and is sealed in its ice." |
| Wording: S/B "to be sealed". |
| Page 84: | "...carbon exists in almost every part of the climate system: in the air as CO2; in vegetation as grass and trees; in soils..." |
| Missing word: S/B "such as grass and trees;". |
| Page 111: | "...and thereby prevented a glaciation from getting underway." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 126: | "...between the warmer interval from 1000 to 1200 and the colder one from 1500 to1750." |
| Missing space: S/B "to 1750". |
| Page 146: | "Almost all of these areas were the same regions that had once been cleared, densely occupied, and heavily farmed by native Americans but had reverted to forest after being abandoned." |
| Capitalization: S/B "Native Americans". |
| Page 160: | "In the1980s the Persian Gulf nations abruptly increased their estimated oil reserves..." |
| Missing space: S/B "the 1980s". |
| Page 170: | "...which had reached peak (warm) values nearly11,000 years ago..." |
| Missing space: S/B "nearly 11,000". |
| Page 170: | "...maximum temperatures were reached nearly8,000 years ago..." |
| Missing space: S/B "nearly 8,000". |
| Page 180: | "The first example is the sea-level rise that is occurring now and will occur in the future as mountain glaciers and other ice melts..." |
| Number: S/B "melt". |
| Page 180: | "...most of Florida would be underwater if all of the ice on Antarctica melted." |
| Missing space: S/B "under water". |
| Page 187: | "Still, in a world where more and more people, especially the younger generation, get most of their news from the web..." |
| Capitalization: S/B "from the Web". |
| Page 189: | "I know of no precedent in science for the kind of day-to-day onslaughts and perversions of basic science now occurring in newsletters and web sites from interest groups. " |
| Capitalization: S/B "Web sites". |
| Page 196: | Bibliography entry: "Schneider, S. H. Laboratory Earth. New York: Basic Books, 1997" |
| The book's title is not italicized. (You can't see it here, because I didn't want to make the formatting changes necessary.) |
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