| KICKING THE CARBON HABIT Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy William Sweet New York: Columbia University Press, 2006 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-231-13710-2 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-231-13710-9 | 256p. | HC/BWI | $? | |
| Page 2: | "The relationship is strictly statistical, a matter of probability." |
| S/B "purely statistical". (It simply reads better.) |
| Page 3: | "Fortunately, the United States has a great deal of room to maneuver. It is by far the richest country in the world, in terms of both total income and per capita income." |
| Not in terms of per capita income; the richest by that measure would be Liechtenstein, Luxembourg or Qatar (or perhaps Norway.) |
| Page 19: | "For one thing, evidence of South Pole glaciation was rather tenuous." |
| Since this is the twentieth century Sweet is writing about, the statement itself seems rather tenuous. Surely Antarctica had been explored enough that its glaciers were known. |
| Page 27: | "The entire process of extracting coal and then disposing of waste products, which are hugely voluminous, is confined to just a few geographically and sparsely populated regions of the country." |
| Probably a missing word: S/B "geographically isolated". |
| Page 29: | "If one were to map the country's largest coal-burning utilities [...] and draw lines connecting all their coal-fired plants, the lines would all intersect in Asheville's vicinity. Accordingly, it ranks as one of the country's most chronically polluted cities." |
| What do these arbitrary lines have to do with the prevailing winds? |
| Page 30: | "Only by conducting large epidemiological studies [...] can its impact be guessed." |
| Word choice: S/B "be learned" or similar. |
| Page 35: | (Box) "...permits allowing them emissions up to some proportion of the total ceiling." |
| Word choice: S/B "some portion". |
| Page 37: | "...and no cuts are required of Russia, New Zealand, or the Ukraine." |
| Outmoded usage: S/B just "Ukraine". |
| Page 45: | "Since electricity generated by natural gas is cheaper than coal-generated electricity under most circumstances..." |
| This is untrue. And what about the fluctuating spot-market price of natural gas, mentioned earlier? |
| Page 47: | "Lesser but still significant constituents come from natural sources, notably dust and volatile organic compounds breathed out by some species of trees." |
| Missing comma: S/B "dust, and volatile organic compounds". |
| Page 48: | "...the Montreal agreement has produced a big fringe benefit for the climate—a little noted fact with some big implications..." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "little-noted fact". |
| Page 53: | "Even when they have properly outfitted plants, they often do not use it when demand for electricity is highest..." |
| Number error, sort of ("it" refers to pollution-control equipment from the previous sentence): S/B "the scrubbers" or something equivalent. |
| Page 57: | "...they do not have the luxury of simply deciding not to burn coal anymore." |
| Missing space: S/B "any more". |
| Page 76: | "In 1961 Hansen took his drill to Camp Century, and by 1966, using a variety of drills, a 1.5-kilometer-long core had been obtained, revealing about 125,000 years of atmospheric and environmental history." |
| Dangling participle, sort of: S/B "had obtained a 1.5-kilometer-long core". |
| Page 79: | "Comparison of the Greenland and Antarctic cores showed," science historian Spencer Weart has observed, that at least some of "the climate changes were truly global, coming at essentially the same time in hemispheres." |
| Missing word: S/B "in both hemispheres". |
| Page 81: | The chart does show the close correspondence between proxy data from ice cores and ocean sediments. |
| But what are the proxy data? The units for the vertical axes are not identified. |
| Page 91: | "Born in 1931 on the smallest of Japan's four major islands, Manabe grew up fairly sheltered from World War II..." |
| That would be the island whose name nobody can remember. Wait, wait; don't tell me... (Cue Jeopardy music.) It's Shikoku. |
| Pages 103-4: | "Though it's hard to believe today, as late as the 1970s many scientists were concerned not about warming but, rather, the possibility that the earth (sic) might be trapped in a cooling cycle." |
| For sufficiently small values of "many". If I didn't know better, I'd think that Sweet repeats a Denialist talking point. |
| Page 110: | "...and dramatic increases in the intensity in rainfall rates and hurricanes are expected." |
| S/B "the intensity of". |
| Page 114: | "When he joined Columbia's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1967..." |
| Probably S/B "NASA's". |
| Page 115: | "Evidently he was one of the first to notice what is now considered a rudimentary element in the warming picture." |
| It's rudimentary, Watson. The word is a synonym for "fundamental". |
| Page 116: | "...increases in the main greenhouse gases [...] warmed earth by roughly an additional 2.5 watts per square meter between 1850 and 2000." |
| Capitalization: S/B "Earth" and "Watts". |
| Page 118: | "...the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted at Rio de Janeiro in 1990." |
| S/B "1992". (See page 133.) |
| Page 124: | "Broecker was born into a family of modest means in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Ernest Hemingway's hometown." |
| Missing space: S/B "home town". |
| Page 125: | "He'd show that when measures of temperature and atmospheric competition from ocean floor bore holes and ice cores were plotted..." |
| S/B "atmospheric composition". (Is it me, or is Sweet making more mistakes in Chapter 8?) |
| Page 126: | "Lake Agassiz suddenly melted..." |
| The entire lake was not frozen. What happened was that a dam of ice holding back its waters broke (or melted), releasing the deluge. |
| Page 127: | "Because it is impossible to predict or even imagine what lies ahead..." |
| Han Solo could imagine this (I imagine). |
| Page 128: | "Yet 'all of that progressive behavior [!] could collapse if carrying capacities everywhere were suddenly lowered drastically by abrupt climate change,' they worried." |
| Sweet refers to a Pentagon report citing worst-case scenarios. His entire paragraph has an editorial tone, and he apparently has a special objection to the report's describing modern warfare, in which nations quit killing when they win instead of slaughtering all their enemies as in medieval times, as "progressive." |
| Page 130: | "Coal and oil are not going to be replaced wholesale by renewable sources of energy in this century." |
| This is way too pessimistic and shortsighted for the time span involved. |
| Page 136: | "...but that certainly cannot be said of what is happening at the earth's poles..." |
| Capitalization: S/B "at the Earth's poles". |
| Page 139: | "...it has led to self-parodying treatments like the one in The Day After, the 2004 movie..." |
| S/B "The Day After Tomorrow". (Sweet may have been thinking of The Day After, a well-regarded 1983 TV movie about the aftermath of a nuclear strike against the U.S., set in or near Lawrence, Kansas.) |
| Page 143: | "If done on a large scale, there also are serious long-term concerns about stability." |
| Dangling participle (sort of): S/B "If sequestration is done on a large scale,". |
| Page 159: | "It is wishful thinking to imagine that renewables can displace more than a fraction of centrally generated electricity.." |
| Shortsighted and vague: Is not 7/8ths a fraction?. |
| Page 162: | "At Battery Park City, a huge residential and commercial complex being developed on landfill adjacent to where the World Trade Center towers once stood, highly articulated green design principles have been a part of the planning process from the start." |
| Highly articulated? Like an articulated locomotive? |
| Page 164: | "Vint Cerf, considered by those in the know to be the main inventor of the Internet (not Al Gore!) has found..." |
| You mean Vinton Cerf didn't invent Al Gore? |
| Pages 164-5: | From the quote by Ayres and Scarlott: "He knows in a vague way, that he is paying for all this..." |
| Missing comma: S/B "knows, in a vague way,". |
| Page 179: | "The world's most prodigious natural gas reserves are in Russia and central Asia, and increasingly, there is acute competition..." |
| Misplaced comma: S/B "Asia and, increasingly, there is". |
| Page 191: | "As for the stretching of nuclear fuels, that benefit comes at the cost of having to widely transport fuels consisting of pure fissile material that could be ripe targets for terrorists seeking to build bombs." |
| Mr. Sweet, with some justification, doesn't favor nuclear fuel recycling. But there's only historical basis for asserting that it involves transporting "pure fissile material" — this is the obsolete PUREX process. Modern methods do not, and processing can be done right at the reactor, minimizing transport. |
| Page 195: | "Not only is a phaseout easier said than done but also, Swedes may be aware that..." |
| Missing comma: S/B "done, but also,". |
| Page 195: | "Austria, having said no to nuclear, now finds itself importing nuclear-generated electricity from Czechoslovakia, its immediate neighbor to the northeast." |
| Czechoslovakia separated into Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1993. |
| Page 196: | "But the other part is best done by shuttering the oldest, least efficient, and dirtiest coal plants not operating, and replacing them with some combination of natural gas and nuclear plants." |
| Typo: S/B "coal plants now operating". |
| Page 198: | "When scientists say the world will be 3°C warmer 75 or 100 years from now—or 5 or 6 degrees, Fahrenheit—of course they do not mean it will be 3°C warmer everywhere and at all times." |
| Extra comma: S/B "degrees Fahrenheit". |
| Page 198: | "In the summer of 2003, Siberian wildfires reportedly incinerated areas almost the size of Oregon." |
| Does this mean a total area almost the size of Oregon, or of multiple Oregons? |
| Page 200: | "But what if, as carbon dioxide levels double, triple, or quadruple, the effects are not merely linear or 'monotonic', as some scientists like to say?" |
| Misplaced comma: S/B "linear, or 'monotonic' as". |
| Page 203: | "But in fact, a precommercial technology..." |
| Missing comma: S/B "But, in fact,". |
| Page 208: | "Australia, like the United States a lone dissenter from Kyoto..." |
| Usage: There can be only one "lone dissenter" — as is the case with the (fictional) immortals of Highlander.1 |
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