| EARTHMASTERS The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering Clive Hamilton New Haven: Yale University Press, March 2013 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-0-300-18667-3 | ||||
| ISBN 0-300-18667-3 | 247pp. | HC | $28.00 | |
| Page 4: | "...and too much emphasis on them for the delights of ridicule would give a very unbalanced impression of the research programme into climate engineering now underway." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 6: | "The anxiety deepened each year through the 2000s as it became clearer that the range of emissions paths mapped out by experts in the 1990s were unduly optimistic..." |
| Number error: S/B "was". |
| Page 12: | "The Earth's climate is a non-linear system, that is, changes in one variable do not lead to simple proportional changes in related ones." |
| Punctuation: S/B "system; that is, changes". (Change the comma after "system" to a semicolon.) |
| Pages 47-48: | "A typical air capture machine might look like a long metal box, 10 metres high and 1 kilometre in length. To extract 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, an array of five would be required covering an area of 1 square kilometre, allowing 250 metres between each box so that there was enough space for the carbon dioxide-depleted air to be replenished." |
| This passage has the general defect of being too specific: It describes one putative point design without considering that there might be alternatives. In particular, it's hard to see why the 250-meter spacings would be needed — especially if the devices received the scrubbed output of a coal-fired power plant. In that case, presumably the much richer source of CO2 could yield more sequestration per year. |
| Page 50: | "Heavily promoted plans for carbon capture and storage [. . .] looks increasingly risky and expensive..." |
| Number error: S/B "look". |
| Page 52: | "The plot of Clive Cussler's thriller The Storm centers on an Arabic Dr No who controls a technology that can manipulate ocean currents so as to shift the monsoon." |
| How many readers will know "Dr No"? (The author subsequently reveals that the technology used by the villain of Cussler's thriller has nothing to do with modifying cloud brightness. It's puzzling why he mentions it.) |
| Page 56: | "But they prevent more heat from escaping than they allow in, so their net effect is to warm the planet." |
| Inadvertent substitution of inapt phrase: S/B "than they reflect back". |
| Page 82: | "(It would be the final irony if we were to extract sulphur before it pollutes the lower atmosphere only to pump it into the upper atmosphere to prevent climate change.)" |
| That would be ironic, to be sure; but probably not the final irony. |
| Page 87: | "For many conservatives, accepting these reliefs is intolerable..." |
| Typo: S/B "beliefs". |
| Page 97: | "The epithet is revealing because it reflected anxiety that Einstein's theory would overthrow the established Newtonian understanding of the world, a destabilization of the social order then underway." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 142: | "A senior meteorologist, Zhu Congwen, stressed the unintended consequences and the puniess of humans in the face of nature in the past..." |
| Missing letter: S/B "puniness". |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.