| THE CLIMATE CASINO Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World William D. Nordhaus New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-300-18977-3 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-300-18977-X | 278pp. | HC/GSI | $30.00 | |
| Page 24: | "What is a model? There are different kinds of models, from model trains to architectural models to scientific models." |
| To me, mentioning these other meanings of the word "model" seems unnecessary. |
| Page 34: | "Remember that the recent deep recession was a complete surprise for virtually every professional forecaster." |
| I'm not sure this is true. |
| Page 37: | "These emissions themselves are not the source of concern." |
| Another unfortunate statement. I half expect to find it used on certain blogs with the claim that William Nordhaus says CO2 is nothing to be concerned about. Of course emissions are a concern. |
| Page 38: | "Since current concentrations are now over 390 ppm, the globe is well outside the range of concentrations experienced during the period that Homo sapiens emerged on earth." |
| Word choice: S/B "when". |
| Page 38: | "Since current concentrations are now over 390 ppm, the globe is well outside the range of concentrations experienced during the period that Homo sapiens emerged on earth." |
| Capitalization: S/B "Earth" since it refers to the planet. |
| Pages 40-41: | "Using this relationship we can actually calculate temperatures on the moon..." |
| No relationship is mentioned in preceding paragraphs, nor is there a note referring to the one described on page 327. |
| Page 49: | "While their results are an outlier among those of other modeling teams..." |
| Read one way, this could be taken to include the results of the other teams as outliers. I would delete the word "other". |
| Page 50: | "A rise in our body temperature from 98°F to 104 or 105°F does not sound like a large change, but it may signal a deadly infection." |
| More to the point, it is a dangerous rise in itself — certainly at 106°F or above. |
| Page 51: | "Look at the last 7,000 years as shown in Figure 10 (time runs backward from right to left)." |
| Inasmuch as this is the normal way of presenting time (earlier dates at the left), this qualification is not needed. |
| Page 54: | "Because banks typically have only a small fraction of their deposits on hand as cash [...], they could not satisfy all their depositors." |
| Verb tense: S/B "cannot". |
| Page 63: | "Even if the globe returns to today's temperature of around 1°C, the GIS grows to only one-fifth of its present volume." |
| The statement, like this paragraph generally, confusingly describes temperature anomaly as absolute temperature. (And few fields use as many acronyms with double meanings: GIS, SLR, SST...) |
| Page 73: | "Hurricanes are currently unmanaged in part because they are unmanageable." |
| I would say this is both a necessary and sufficient cause for not managing hurricanes. Delete the "in part". |
| Page 76: | "We could stop global warming in its tracks by banning all fossil fuels today." |
| Rashly oversimplified: the author is well aware that a portion of warming is already "locked in." |
| Page 83: | "Crop productivity or yields are the output per acre of land under cultivation." |
| Number error: S/B "yield is". |
| Page 104: | "We see this in the area of public and private health, agricultural shocks, environmental disasters and degradation, and violence." |
| Number error: S/B "areas". |
| Page 114: | "I have not yet read that ocean acidification is a hoax." |
| I know of one such claim: In "The New American" (the John Birch Society magazine) possibly as early as 2008. I couldn't find an article that matches what I remember using their search function. But Ocean Acidification Scam is a blog post dated 19 March 2009. |
| Page 192: | "At a 6 percent money interest rate, the $26 paid for Manhattan in 1626 would yield $152 billion today." |
| According to Matt Soniak of Mental Floss, there is a good deal of controversy surrounding this transaction. First, the quoted price of 60 Dutch guilders comes from a treaty documented in November of 1626, well after the May 24 date of transfer. Then we come to inflation, which Soniak says puts the current value of the deal at $951.08. There are hints that not all the trade goods given to the natives were accounted for. Finally, it may be that the Canarsee tribe, who concluded the deal, did not have the right to trade Manhattan Island. All that said, $26 (or the traditional value of $24) serves well enough, as it is nearly as far from the current value of the property. |
| Page 239: | "Historically, the permits or allowances under cap-and-trade plans were allocated free of charge to firms who were regulated." |
| Word choice: S/B "firms which". |
| Page 264: | "Calculations show that they would both have an average cost of $12 per ton of CO2 reduction of attaining the benchmark U.S. emissions-reduction goal." |
| Word choice: S/B "for" or "toward". |
| Page 283: | "The first important practical applications for the photovoltaic cell were not created until more than a century after Becquerel's discovery." |
| That would put them in 1939. The photocell for cameras... |
| Page 297: | "Not every scientist or economist would agree with every finding, but most have a secure footing in the published and peer-reviewed literature." |
| Missing word: S/B "but most findings have". |
| Page 299: | "The U.S. Clean Air Act defines an air pollutant as any air pollution agent or combination of such agents, including any physical, chemical, biological, radioactive . . . substance or matter..." |
| A rather circular definition. |
| Page 308: | "But they are usually vague on the details on the details of many political, economic, or scientific questions, and the science of global warming seems to be one of the details." |
| Missing words: S/B "one of the details they're vague about" or equivalent. |
| Page 320: | "But the coal industry has strong congressional representation and great folk songs." |
| I have to question this, because the coal-mining songs I know don't paint coal mining in a positive light. These are songs like "Coal Tattoo", which I used to sing. (Here's the original by Billy Ed Wheeler.) |
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