| THE WINDS OF CHANGE Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations Eugene Linden Boston: Beacon Press, February 2006 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 0-978-684-86352-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-684-86352-9 | 302pp. | HC/GSI | $26.00 | |
| Page 1: | "Turbo-charged by complacency, folly, and incompetence, Katrina destroyed a great city, transforming New Orleans into a septic stew of floating bodies, roaming gangs, disease, and toxic slime. The storm launched a wave of refugees not seen in the United States since the Dust Bowl, and the damage inflicted on crucial energy and transport infrastructure sent ripples throughout the economy." |
| This is a bit florid. However, it is essentially accurate: Katrina's effects would not have been so disastrous without the contributions of defective levees, poor disaster preparations, and incompetent responses on the part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. |
| Page 20: | "Over two decades, Thomas McGovern, has pieced together a picture of just how bad life became..." |
| Extra comma: S/B "Thomas McGovern". |
| Page 24: | "It is possible they somehow evacuated, but why then would Skidmore find carrion flies in the bedroom." |
| Improper punctuation: S/B "bedroom?". |
| Page 30: | "As it moves northward, evaporation makes the water saltier and heavier, and when lobes of the current pass over an underwater sill in the far north, the weight of the salt water carries it down into the depths, in effect, pulling the current behind it." |
| Extra comma: S/B "in effect pulling". |
| Page 32: | "The great engines of the THC are two sites in the northern seas where surface water sinks to form deep ocean water, pulling warm water north behind it. There has been no deep sinking observed at either site in recent years. One shut down in 1982, the other in 1998, and no one can say whether this work stoppage is natural or the beginning of a major climate swing." |
| False dichotomy: Although this climate swing may not be natural, most have been. |
| Page 32: | "The answer to the two crucial questions—what climate change means and what it could bring—has changed dramatically as our ability to decode evidence and filter out static has improved over the years." |
| My first thought was to call this an error of number: S/B "The answers"..."have changed". However, in terms of the impact of climate change on humans, both questions parse as nearly identical. |
| Page 36: | "Even as climate change led to the extinction of many species, it created the circumstances for the emergence of bigger-brained hominins (the term refers to those Hominidae more closely related to modern humans than to apes)..." |
| This term first appears in the previous sentence. It's unusual — and maybe unique to this book. I certainly have never encountered it before; I fail to see the advantage over the more familiar "hominids". |
| Page 37: | "Climate challenges favored the generalists of successive hominin lines, and by about 1 million years ago those generalists had developed!enough tools to deal with changing weather and survive the periods of instability." |
| Exclamation point instead of space: S/B "developed enough". |
| Page 38: | "He also notes that, at the same time, homo was going through a period of rapid brain growth, which was one evolutionary path toward becoming a better generalist." |
| Hmmm... I wonder what the alternative pathways are. Animals usually adapt by specializing in some way: better camouflage, more fleetness of foot, stronger jaws and claws, etc. Adapting by inventing new tools and behaviors is revolutionary, and I find it hard to imagine any way to be a generalist except through the agency of mind. (I suppose becoming a shape-shifter would qualify; but that path is a logistical nightmare. Note that no shape-shifter exists on Earth.) |
| Page 41: | "According to subsequent text, the temperature fell by 5°C 8,200 years ago. Based on that, the graph that opens this chapter covers a temperature range of 30°C or more, with the minimum occurring 16,000 years ago. (No temperature scale is provided.) |
| This seems too large; an average temperature 30°C below today's would surely wipe out most life forms on the planet. |
| Page 45: | "...something that doesn't occur at any other time in the entire 11,700 record." |
| Missing word: S/B "11,700-year record". |
| Pages 56-57: | "A good example of the ways in which sudden climate change unleashed a cascade of repercussions took place in A.D. 536, when some mysterious event darkened the sun for over a year." |
| Curious: If the Sun's output actually fell enough to be noticed in these pre-telescope times, it argues for some unknown aspect of solar physics. Of course, that's a literal interpretation of the phrase. It's equally valid to take it as meaning that the sun's light was blocked from reaching Earth — as by dust in the atmosphere. I'd rather he had chosen a less ambiguous phrase. And in any case, a citation would be welcome. |
| Page 62: | "They [bark beetles] have broadened their preferred diet from lodge pole at lower altitude to include white pine at 8,000 feet and above." |
| Extra space, missing word: S/B "lodgepole pine". |
| Page 68: | "The subsequent resulting chaos then amplifies famine, disease, and civil conflict." |
| As opposed to the previous resulting chaos? Extra word: S/B "resulting chaos". |
| Page 70: | "As Gill puts it in Great Maya Droughts, 'the basic, fundamental premise of this book is that when a society runs out of food and water, the people die.' " |
| "War dims hope for peace." |
| Page 73: | "The bare bones of this retelling does not do justice to the horrors that must have accompanied this collapse." |
| Number: S/B "bare-bones nature" or something similar. |
| Page 74: | "During the last stages of starvation, one might gain a fine fur that covers large parts of what remains of one's body." |
| Poor description, implying loss of limbs: S/B simply "of one's body". (For emphasis, add "emaciated".) |
| Page 91: | "The renowned paleontologist Raymond Dart published a paper in 1925 describing a homonid skull..." |
| Spelling: S/B "hominid". (And whatever happened to "hominin"?) |
| Pages 91-92: | "While it was impolitic to talk about the environment as a shaper of brains and civilization, however, it has gradually become acceptable to write about environmental factors as destroyers." |
| This is badly misstated. People have been talking (and writing) about environment as a shaper of civilization since Darwin's time, if not before. |
| Page 103: | "But as this jet is moving north, the earth is rotating toward the west under the water so that the path the water takes over the land seems to curve to the right." |
| Uh... the Earth rotates to the east, so the path curves left. |
| Page 120: | "Based on the study of a European ice core project from Antarctica that provides a 740,000-year record..." |
| Compare the statement on page 118: "...although scientists only have reliable ice core data for the past 400,000 years." Contradictory statements do not enhance the trustworthiness of a book. |
| Page 127: | "—but toward the bottom of the ice sheet, folding and deformation takes place..." |
| Number error: S/B "folding and deformation take place". |
| Page 137: | "...evidence that has both deepened understanding of rapid climate change but also raised new questions." |
| Unneeded word: S/B "has deepened". |
| Page 139: | "...they have to seek places with rapidly accumulating sediments in order to uncover for climate change signals that might otherwise be missed..." |
| Extra word: S/B "in order to uncover climate change signals". |
| Page 163: | "What happened to the world's climate 4,200 years ago remains something of a mystery. Whether climate also cooled 4,200 years ago is open to question..." |
| Somehow it seems that one of these dates is wrong. |
| Page 175: | "DeMenocal and his colleagues dissolved the sand grain-sized shells extracted from a particular point in the sediments in an acid to liberate the CO2, and then separate the oxygen so that they could measure the oxygen-isotope rations. Among other things, their results reveal that big changes can be concealed by what looks like small variations in annual global temperatures." |
| These highlighted verbs should agree in tense. I'd make the second one past-tense to agree with the first. |
| Page 139: | "...they have to seek places with rapidly accumulating sediments in order to uncover for climate change signals that might otherwise be missed..." |
| Extra word: S/B "in order to uncover climate change signals". |
| Page 201: | "How might the world be different if the fifty-year lacuna in El Niños had taken place in the last half of the nineteenth century rather than in the middle of the twentieth." |
| This is a question; it should end in a question mark. |
| Page 216: | "The other pieces of the heat distribution system that make earth a friendly place for humans, however, depend on..." |
| Refers to the planet: S/B "Earth". |
| Page 216: | "...and a great race is underway to understand what we have already done, and what lies ahead." |
| S/B "under way". |
| Page 251: | "Paul Brown of the Guardian quotes Charles Keeling, the climate scientist who first began taking readings of CO2 on Mauna Loa in 1958, as saying that it's possible that this rise could represent 'a weakening of the Earth's carbon sinks, meaning that the Earth is increasingly losing it's ability to store the carbon we release into the atmosphere.' " |
| Grammar: S/B "losing its ability". |
| Page 259: | "The 9/11 attacks opened insurer's eyes to other risks they had assumed for free, climate change being among the most obvious." |
| Number error: S/B "insurers' ". |
| Page 264: | "DuPont, the world's largest producer of CFCs successfully lobbied the Reagan administration to halt steps that had been underway since the previous Carter administration." |
| S/B "CFCs, successfully" and "under way". |
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