Earth Words Book

Here are some of the interesting issues the author raises to question whether man's activities are going to cause a global warming and the predicted negative effects:
-- urban heat island effect inflating temperature readings
-- increasing temperatures lead to increased evaporation, which might lead to increased snowfall at the poles, which might lead to a net decrease in sea level rather than a net increase from melting ice
-- computer models don't agree with observations, so we can't rely on them for predictions

Maybe these have been dealt with conclusively in other books or papers, I don't know.

I'm not a climate scientist, so I have great difficulty telling if this scientist's views are more well-supported than another scientist's. So the book leaves me in the same place I was when I started reading it, more or less, except that I am more familiar with the global warming critics' side.

Overall the book was a bit sloppy and repetitive in places. He doesn't define terms and writes as if the reader already knows what things like "radiative forcing" are. Sometimes he seems to use double standards, like on page 12 when he dismisses global climate models but cites evidence from other computer models that try to understand climate change: "Attempts have been made to 'fix' the discrepancy [between observations and computer model results:] by introducing into the GCMs the effects of sulfate aerosols said to cool and counteract the positive radiative forcing of greenhouse gases... But a recent modeling experiment indicates that the aerosol effect is minute and ascribes the lack of troposphere warming to a cooling of the stratosphere..."