| HACK THE PLANET Science's Best Hope—or Worst Nightmare—for Averting Climate Catastrophe Eli Kintisch New York: John Wiley & Sons, April 2010 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-470-52426-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-470-52426-X | 279pp. | HC | $25.95 | |
| Page 3: | "The workshop's unholy topic was geoengineering: the concept of manually tinkering with Earth's thermostat to reverse global warming." |
| Objective journalism? |
| Page 5: | "But if the scientists in the room called for more studies such as Wood's, it would mean endorsing a research field that had always been considered closer to science fiction." |
| You mean, like wormholes or superstrings? |
| Page 11: | "Things had come to Robert Socolow..." |
| This phrase occurs three times in paragraph two. It's inapt: S/B "Things had come to this:" in each case. It had been an outcast, a pariah. Now it was back. Things had come to this: The idea of modifying the climate of the only planet we've got suddenly seemed... |
| Page 25: | "...scientists said that Greenland's melting alone would contribute 2 1/2 feet to the sea level rise, without even factoring Antarctica melting." |
| Missing word: S/B "factoring in". |
| Page 27: | "If that's the case, then the warming we've seen is a result of the net warming effect of two 1-Watt lights." |
| This reasoning is backward. If you're measuring 3 Watts of warming, and then discover there is 1 Watt of cooling mixed in, the lights must be contributing 4 Watts. |
| Page 29: | "Warmer seas mean melting ice; when ice floating on the ocean melts, a white, light-reflecting surface is replaced with dark, light-absorbing seawater, which amplifies the warming, as does natural carbon emissions from the permafrost..." |
| Number: S/B "as do natural carbon emissions". |
| Page 32: | "Humans probably won't much affect the planet anymore because there won't be many of us around." |
| Missing space: S/B "any more". |
| Page 40: | "Human activities are responsible for roughly 8 billion tons of carbon emissions to date, but it's unclear how much we'll emit in 2020." |
| Missing time period: S/B "8 billion tons of carbon emissions per year to date". (I also question the 8 billion figure. New Scientist says, "Human emissions of CO2 are now estimated to be 26.4 Gt per year, up from 23.5 Gt in the 1990s, according to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in February 2007 (pdf format). Disturbances to the land — through deforestation and agriculture, for instance — also contribute roughly 5.9 Gt per year." These numbers are probably in tonnes, metric tons, but still higher than Kintisch estimates. |
| Page 43: | "...and scientists are reluctantly aware of the shortcomings of their scientific tools to understand the fast changing, situation." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "fast-changing". |
| Page 44: | "But as planethacking research has slowly matured..." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "plane-thacking" — like "train-spotting". That's right, isn't it? I must ask my cow-orkers. But seriously, I'd much prefer this be written as "planet-hacking;" it appears at least 16 more times in the book. |
| Page 60: | "Wood played to type, goading on the audience..." |
| Extra word: S/B "goading". |
| Page 62: | "...the haze of droplets were known by Westerners as the 'dry fog'." |
| Number: S/B "was known". |
| Page 62: | "Trapped in the stratosphere, neither winds nor rain could wash it out." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "it could be washed out by neither wind nor rain" or similar. |
| Pages 64-5: | "(Conspiracy theorists who believe in 'chemtrails' say the air force is doing it already." |
| Capitalization: S/B "the Air Force". |
| Page 65: | "...that cost wasn't a factor for nations who entered World War II." |
| Usage: S/B "nations which". |
| Page 70: | "They might even block enough radiation to make up for the ozone it destroys..." |
| Number: S/B "they destroy". |
| Page 82: | "Physically remaking their country took on a more systematic and grandiose effort by scientists in Russia..." |
| D.P. or usage: S/B "became". |
| Page 82: | "The noosphere—from the Greek noos, for mind..." |
| Punctuation: S/B "noösphere". |
| Pages 82-3: | "The noösphere—from the Greek noös, for mind, and coined, not surprisingly, by a French philosopher—included humans as well as their technology." |
| Those French philosophers, always coining words like "nöosphere" or "homanization" or "planethacking." (In fact, the coiner of "noösphere was more than a philosopher: he was the Jesuit war hero and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.2 |
| Page 85: | "They provided influential researchers such as mathematician Johnny von Neumann a tool..." |
| Right — Robby Oppenheimer, Eddie Teller, Richie Feynman, Teddy Taylor, Georgie Gamow, Vanny Bush and all those influential big-domes. |
| Page 86: | "The navy's Project Scud involved feeding cyclones; the air force seeded cumulus clouds..." |
| Capitalization: S/B "Navy's" and "Air Force". |
| Page 91: | "In 1974 a pair of scientists theorized that the refrigerant Freon..." |
| Capitalization: If this is capitalized, it should be because it's a trade name; and then the trademark symbol should follow it. |
| Page 96: | "...he mistakenly simulated the effect on the ozone layer if a thousand megaton bombs were detonated..." |
| Missing word: S/B "a thousand one-megaton bombs". |
| Page 97: | "...the seventy-one-year-old scientist launched a personal campaign to defend nuclear energy [...], preparing for twenty hours per day, he said, until we worked himself into a heart attack from the strain." |
| Typo: S/B "he worked himself". |
| Page 105: | "Costanz often says controversial things in the northern California calm befitting his pedigree as a rock-climber-mountain-biker-surfer-U.S.-national-water-polo-team-alum." |
| Is it the northern California calm which befits Costanza's "pedigree," or the controversial things he says? |
| Page 107: | "(The 2.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted each year [...] only makes our task more difficult.)" |
| Number: S/B "make". |
| Page 111: | "...with most of the sooty coal dust found where trucks each day deliver it to a large pile where it is ground up before burning." |
| Clarity: S/B "deliver coal". |
| Page 111: | "...a relatively small control room features a handful of computer screens and engineers watching them, as well as manual controls with the obligatory old-fashioned lights and switches." |
| Yeah — lights, switches, rheostats, d'Arsonvaal meters... all so 1980s. |
| Page 116: | "...provided it can sell the carbon dioxide to oil companies who use the gas to tap old oil wells and get extra petroleum out of it." |
| Number: S/B "out of them". |
| Page 118: | "Injected deep enough, there appear to be few threats to groundwater..." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "it appears to pose little threat". |
| Page 119: | "Dozens of small- and medium-scale projects have gotten underway successfully in the United States." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 122: | "When I raised these concerns to Calera, they would not respond openly to my critique, asking instead to sign a nondisclosure agreement." |
| missing word: S/B "asking me instead". |
| Page 122: | "He questioned Caldera's 'personal integrity' and mentioned a patent Caldera had applied for 2001 on a related technology." |
| Spelling: S/B "Calera", both places. Caldera is a computer company owned by Novell. |
| Page 122: | "He questioned Caldera's 'personal integrity' and mentioned a patent Caldera had applied for 2001 on a related technology." |
| Missing word: S/B "for in 2001". |
| Page 132: | "The concentrations of the materials we put in our almost homeopathic medicine..." |
| Typo: S/B "are". |
| Page 139: | "That made her the P. Diddy of oceanography—she knew everybody." |
| The P. Diddy of oceanography. Great. |
| Page 164: | "When they're healthy, Phaeocystis forms colonies..." |
| Number: S/B "it's". |
| Page 179: | "What ensued was a comparison of encouraging results from unreliable models compared with the risks that the same unreliable models suggested." |
| Why are the models considered unreliable? Kintisch does not say. |
| Page 185: | "Standing to wrap up, the moment seemed to crack Wanser's professional exterior..." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Wanser seemed to lose his professional demeanor" or similar. |
| Page 192: | "'Look, I don't drink the IPCC Kool-Aid on climate change,' he declares." |
| This is David Schnare, Ph.D., an EPA scientist!1 Oh, the statement was made in 2008? Never mind... |
| Page 200: | Discussion of Alan Carlin's 2009 work. Carlin was then an EPA economist. |
| Kintish neglects to mention that much of Carlin's paper was plagiarized from [the George Marshall Institute?]. |
| Page 201: | "NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt called Carlin's work 'a ragbag collection of un-peer-reviewed Web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology.'" |
| Dr. Schmidt's article on the subject, Bubkes, actually calls it "a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at." Also plagiarism from known anti-climate-science groups. |
| Page 207: | "The hesitation among some on the left, including those in power, not to publicly embrace geoengineering research is a strategic choice, not an ideological one." |
| Unwanted negative: S/B "to publicly embrace". |
| Pages 218-19: | "Subsequent experiments on a smaller scale than the planned Kona one showed that carbon dioxide released under water 'did exactly what the MIT guys said it would do,' says Peter Brewer, with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute: they had no ecologically significant effect." |
| Is this a number error? It certainly seems to be. But the point is arguable. |
| Page 233: | "Technology and development, he lamented, had ridden most of the world of this essential quality." |
| Probable transcription error: S/B "had ridded", "had rid" or possibly "had robbed". |
| Page 234: | "Maybe the biggest question we face may be how changing the planet will change ourselves." |
| Redundant word: S/B "The biggest question we face may be". |
| Page 236: | "'Geoengineering,' wrote climate change advocate Bill Becker of the Presidential Climate Action Project..." |
| What is a "climate change advocate" in this context? I don't think it means what Kintisch intended. |
| Page 237: | "...Fuller made nature a separate thing on which people could manipulate like a machine..." |
| Extra word: S/B "which people could manipulate". |
| Page 238: | "The romantics consider human beings connected in a spiritual sense with the rest of Earth, so they urge us to live with environmental modestly." |
| Some stray, vagrant extra rogue letters have sneaked in: S/B either "environmental modesty" or "environment modestly". |
| Page 278: | Index entry: "Trenberth, Kevin, 67, 73." |
| S/B "Trenberth, Kevin, 67, 72". |
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