Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming
- ISBN13: 9780756639952
- Condition: New
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Product Description
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been issuing the essential facts and figures on climate change for nearly two decades. But the hundreds of pages of scientific evidence quoted for accuracy by the media and scientists alike, remain inscrutable to the general public who may still question the validity of climate change.
Esteemed climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump, have partnered with DK Publishing to present Dire Pre… More >>
If you’re like me, you’ve longed for a user-friendly book to both clarify your own thoughts about global warming and to recommend to those acquaintances, friends, relatives, and colleagues who are either indifferent to climate change or think it’s a bunch of tree-hugging hooey. Believe me, Dire Predictions is the book we’ve been waiting for. I rarely gush in the reviews I write. But I’m gushing in this one.
Authors Michael Mann and Lee Kump, the former a weather scientist and the latter a geoscientist, have put together a primer on global warming drawn from IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports that offers incredibly helpful illustrations and graphs, beautiful photographs, and informative, to the point text. The explanations are concise, typically a single topic to a page fold, and they focus on exactly the kinds of questions and issues that most of us have wondered about–for example, Is our atmosphere really warming?; How to build a climate model; Back to the future: Deep time holds clues to climate change; Fingerprints distinguish human and natural impacts on climage; Why is it called greenhouse effect? and Couldn’t the increase in atmosphere CO2 be the result of natural cycles?
The book is divided into 5 parts:
1. Climate Change Basics
2. Projections of Future Climate Change
3. Impacts of Climate Change
4. Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change
5. Solving Global Warming
One of the best features of the Mann and Kump’s approach is that they don’t hesitate to respond directly to the “debunkers” of global warming that have become popular of late.
A wonderful book, exactly the sort of popular science approach that citizens, community activists, public policy makers, and presidential candidates need to get clear on the facts and implications of global warming. Highly recommended. Six stars.
Rating: 5 / 5
I love the concept behind this book: an “illustrated” guide instead of another long text of prose about global warming. It has tons of charts and graphs and colorful pictures, so you learn the field in a new way — less abstractly, more intuitively. Slightly below a Scientific American-level. This book would be great for someone who wants to understand climate change, but doesn’t have the background (or patience) to read a 300 page book on it. Plus it would be great for kids 7th grade and up.
I’ve read hundreds of books and articles and papers on climate change, and yet I still learn things from nearly every page in the book, no matter where in it I start.
Rating: 4 / 5
Excellent book for those interested in getting the facts and science of climate change. It is actually a summary of the 3000+ pages of the IPCC AR4 2007 reports. All the aspects are covered efficiently: physical basis, paleoclimatology, climate models, impacts, projections and GHG emission scenarios, adaptation and mitigation measures. The authors have done a wonderful job in making complex, interdisciplinary science understandable to anybody. Recommended to those wishing to have a quick guide to climate change without scientific compromise.
On the aesthetics side: this book is very nicely done. Text easy to read, nice pictures, well-chosen relevant and easy-to-grasp figures and charts, everything is done so the reader enjoys reading the book. Its structure is so that each set of two pages is independent on the previous ones. That means that you can browse through the book and pick up any random page to read! Cross-references are numerous.
A reference for the layman.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book could easily be titled, “A Guide to Help Climate Skeptics Understand Why They are Wrong.” It’s written, not in a dull, didactic, “here are the facts,” manner, but more as a presentation of the arguments in which the standard questions from the other side are addressed as major section headings, such as, “Couldn’t the increase in carbon dioxide be the result of natural cycles?.”
Pretty much the bottom line conclusion of the book is presented in large, bold font near the end of first section where the authors say that if we don’t do something to change our ways, the atmospheric carbon dioxide level will exceed “anything experienced on earth for over 50 million years.” Could the stakes be laid out any more clearly?
The tables need to be turned on the climate skeptics — it’s time for the burden of proof to be placed upon their shoulders — as in, you folks need to prove to us that it’s possible to alter the atmosphere so significantly and NOT have something undesirable happen.
The structure of the book is very simple and powerful. In five nicely color-coded sections they lay out the basics of the problem, what the science predicts will happen, and how to avoid or cope with it. The style of writing is efficient, direct, to the point, and periodically snappy, such as asking, “Is it time to sell that beach house?”
The overall look of the book is almost as VISUAL as a slide show. This is a book that is perfect for undergraduates, the general public, and pretty much everyone willing to put their trust in science rather than politics.
Rating: 5 / 5
The IPCC documents are quite heavy for the non-scientist who wishes to learn about the current state of climate change science. This book provides the reader with the most important information of these IPCC documents in an easy-to-read, highly illustrated format. Well done!
Scott A. Mandia, Professor – Physical Sciences
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Rating: 5 / 5