Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Outstanding book. This offers a perspective that isn't available for the most part to people. The author talks about the effects not focused on in the media (the media often focuses on rising sea levels which are later happenings and will be the least of our problems for many decades), he talks about the move of the very dry sub tropic atmospheric regions northward (already occurring) and what it means for the worlds farm areas - not good and is impacting areas already. Then he talks about possible geo-political impacts of these. Mr. Dwyer talked with Military planners as well as scientists to find projected effects of Global Warming, long before we have to worry about rising sea levels. And in particular with the Military planners (US and foreign) what projected geopolitical effects they see - big destabilizing ones. The US military under President Bush sees this as real and the biggest threat to the US in the decades ahead, because of what it does to stability of other countries. He touches on where we are in relation to actually dealing with the problem (not good) and touches on whether he thinks the world's political establishments can actually deal with this in a timely way.
He also analyzes ways of dealing with the problem, both from a phasing out CO2 emissions perspective, but he also analyzes proposed geo-engineering stop gaps - which would be possibly used when we blow the deadlines (as we're on track to) and face disastrous consequences. He analyzes how this scientific based problem became enmeshed into ideological struggles in the US, Australia and Canada and not other parts of the World (for the most part) - fascinating analysis.
Regarding the previous reviewers opinion on the authors analysis of Coal CCS - I have to disagree with what the reviewer said. The author analyzes it, just as he analyzes all the other solutions (or proposed solutions), dispassionately and with an even hand - the main issue he saw with CCS (besides the fact that a true CCS plant hasn't been built yet) was that it will result in very expensive electricity (as a good portion of the power and construction investment costs from the plant would have to be used for CCS) and looking at it from a market perspective, it won't be very successful because of that (cause it will be very expensive electricity). (i.e. you could put CCS on your car, but it would be complicated and expensive and there are other cheaper solutions available to get to the same end goal of eliminating/reducing CO2 emissions).
Mr. Dwyer's own opinion is that we won't be able to get our act together enough to prevent the big feedback's from kicking in and taking control of climate change away from just CO2 emissions reduction - and that we'll eventually (probably) have to entertain some of the geo-engineering solutions (he doesn't actually like that conclusion) and that it would be smart to have researched/tested them and have them available to us before they're needed - these things might prevent ice caps from totally melting (Antarctica and Greenland), but wouldn't keep the oceans from becoming too acidic and dying for the most part.
This is a phenomenal work, obviously compiled with great effort and care. The extensive interviews he conducted were done in 2008 and included the latest opinions of scientists and military planners at that point. It provides a well reasoned opinion on things and possible geo-political outcomes based on projected effects that isn't available in most publications on climate change or in the political debate relating to it. Its a work to get, but its worth it - best climate change book I've read in years.
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