Reviews for Histoire Jeu Science Dans L'Aire De LA Litterature

The average rating for Histoire Jeu Science Dans L'Aire De LA Litterature based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-23 00:00:00 Benjamin Rojek If you are looking for a book to explain climate change, this is not it. The author is a professional sower of doubt, whose career as a scientist took a sharp right turn in the sixties/seventies when health/environmental issues began driving government intervention and regulation. The author is ideologically opposed to government regulation and has fought a number of questionable battles against it including attempting to undermine action against tobacco, acid rain, CFC's and now climate change. For a history of science denial and the generation of doubt, you may be interested in Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt or David Michaels Doubt is Their Product. Science denial, which also includes anti-vaxxing advocates, has a now easily identifiable toolkit which includes fake experts, cherry picking, logical fallacies, red herrings, and, of course, conspiracy theories. The author contributed greatly to this toolkit and its easily identifiable in the text. It still may be valuable to read this book as an example of science denial tactics, but as a source of information on climate change it is pure trash.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-26 00:00:00 Ethan Golden 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..."