Book reviews

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

by Bryan Walker February 21, 2012

It was clearly never Michael Mann’s wish to be embroiled in the public controversy that has been manufactured by the denial industry around his and his co-authors’ work. He’s a scientist first and foremost, the nine-year-old who wanted to know what it meant to go faster than the speed of light, the high school student [...]

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Reframing the Problem of Climate Change

by Bryan Walker February 7, 2012

There’s no reason why facing up to the challenge of climate change should not result in wide benefits to human society, including economic benefits. That’s the argument of the multiple authors of Reframing the Problem of Climate Change: From Zero Sum Game to Win-Win Solutions. The book is based on papers presented at a 2010 [...]

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What Will Work

by Bryan Walker January 24, 2012

Kristin Shrader-Frechette of the University of Notre Dame is rigorous in the presentation of her argument in What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power. In recent times a number of leading environmentalists have concluded nuclear power has to be employed to enable the transition away from fossil fuels. Shrader-Frechette disagrees. [...]

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Climate Change and Migration

by Bryan Walker January 15, 2012

It’s all too easy for wealthy America and Europe to treat climate-induced migration as a border security issue. Gregory White, Professor of Government at Smith College in Massachusetts, argues in his recent book Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World that a security-minded response to the phenomenon is both inappropriate and [...]

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Early Warming

by Bryan Walker January 5, 2012

Nancy Lord is a writer who has spent her adult life in Alaska. In her new book, Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North, she tells the stories of people and places and natural environments on whom climate change is impacting in her part of the world. She is climate science savvy, understanding [...]

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Politics of Climate Justice

by Bryan Walker December 28, 2011

I warm to any writer who identifies the solution to climate change in the simple terms employed by Patrick Bond in his recent book Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below: leave fossil fuels in the soil, halt deforestation, transform our economies so that renewable energy, public transport and low-carbon systems replace those currently [...]

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What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

by Bryan Walker December 22, 2011

A couple of months ago when the publishers sent me a review copy I’d requested of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth they enclosed another shorter book in case I might like to review it as well. I thought from the title it was possibly too similar to The Ecological Rift to warrant [...]

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Introduction to Modern Climate Change

by Bryan Walker November 23, 2011

I wouldn’t normally seek a text book for review, but a pre-publication recommendation described this one as excellent reading for any lay person interested in the subject. I’d also seen the author, Andrew Dessler, in an television interview which I wrote about, which was further encouragement. The book is An Introduction to Modern Climate Change. [...]

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Too Many People?

by Bryan Walker November 12, 2011

In 1932 I was born into a world of 2 billion people.  Nearly 80 years on there are 7 billion, more than three times as many. My own small country New Zealand has nearly tripled its population in that time. I confess to feeling anxiety about the capacity of the globe to sustain this level [...]

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Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change

by Bryan Walker November 1, 2011

Canadian investigative journalist William Marsden doesn’t hide his anguish or his anger as he reports the maddening incapacity of political leaders and negotiators to come to terms with climate change. Nor should he. It’s a sorry story he has to tell in his new book Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change. Marsden’s [...]

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