Book reviews

Global Warming and Political Intimidation

by Bryan Walker July 5, 2011

Climatologist Raymond Bradley has come out fighting in his new short book Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up. It’s a lively, albeit sobering narrative which recounts his and others’ experience of harassment, character assassination and unfounded accusation from the politicians who serve fossil fuel interests [...]

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Tropic of Chaos

by Bryan Walker June 20, 2011

The title piqued my curiosity: Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. Christian Parenti’s book is about what he calls “the catastrophic convergence”, when the dislocations of climate change collide with already-existing crises of poverty and violence. He points to evidence, often in tropical countries, that political, economic and environmental disasters [...]

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Generation Us

by Bryan Walker June 12, 2011

Andrew Weaver is a notable Canadian climate scientist. He’s recently written a short book for the general reader to give an easily understandable account of the science of human-caused climate change, to explain its impacts and to suggest solutions. The book is published as one of the Rapid Reads series by Raven Books. It’s titled [...]

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Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist

by Bryan Walker June 7, 2011

In 1994 Ray Anderson, a captain of industry, founder and CEO of the large and successful carpet tile company Interface, was indicted as a plunderer of the earth.  At least that’s how he describes what happened when he took up Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce and read it overnight. It marked a turning-point for [...]

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A Perfect Moral Storm

by Bryan Walker June 2, 2011

Humanity is facing an extreme risk from unabated climate change. The science is widely understood and accepted. Yet we seem paralysed when it comes to reducing the threat: in spite of 20 years of international talk emissions continue to rise alarmingly. The dangerous political inertia which besets us is investigated in Stephen Gardiner’s book A [...]

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Changing Planet, Changing Health

by Bryan Walker May 23, 2011

Interconnectedness is a major theme of Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens our Health and What We Can Do about It. Jeffrey Sachs describes the book in his preface as “a scientific detective story of the first order, told with brilliance and relish by one of the world’s great ecological detectives”. The [...]

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Life Without Oil

by Bryan Walker May 17, 2011

“A gradual contraction into more sustainable patterns of resource use is not the norm for a society that is exploiting the environment. The norm is a last-ditch effort to maintain outward displays of power, and then a sudden, and dramatic, collapse.”   That’s one of the foreboding statements with which Steve Hallett and John Wright punctuate [...]

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The Fate of Greenland

by Bryan Walker May 9, 2011

Gary Comer was a wealthy retired American who found on a private voyage in 2001 that he was able to easily navigate the normally ice-bound Northwest Passage in northern Canada. It perturbed him that he could do so and resulted in his substantial funding of scientific research into the global extent of abrupt climate change. [...]

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Climate Capitalism

by Bryan Walker May 3, 2011

Climate protection is good business.  Entrepreneurs and companies who engage in it are prospering. That’s the message of L. Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen in their recently published book Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change . They energetically urge entrepreneurs and businesses to take advantage of the opportunities opened by the need [...]

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Climate: The Counter Consensus

by Gareth April 29, 2011

This review of Bob Carter’s latest book, by Dr James Renwick, Principal Scientist at NIWA’s Climate Variability & Change group, was first published in the March newsletter of the Geoscience Society of New Zealand. My thanks to Jim for permission to republish it here. This book is a curious read, full of misinformation, straw-man arguments, [...]

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