Category: Books and literature

Discussion of books and other literature

Best books of 2009

Back in 2007, I put up a post listing my five favourite books of the year. Somehow, I missed 2008. Despite that, I am still happy to assert that the 2007 list includes some of the best books I have ever read.

Among the books I read in 2009, these are the five I most emphatically recommend:

It was a tough choice.

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood would be a natural successor to Oryx and Crake back in 2008. Unfortunately, the better book of the two remains the original.

If I had read Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed soon after it had come out, it might have been one of my choices. That said, it is a compelling and important book.

Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution certainly deserves a nod. For anyone who wants a comprehensible account of why we know as much about evolution as we do, this is the book to read.

You can read all my book reviews here.

I may eventually cook up a retroactive 2008 list.

Storms of My Grandchildren

Writer Robert Pool has defined a ‘witness’ as “someone who believes he has information so important that he cannot keep silent.” In the preface to his book, Storms of My Grandchildren, climatologist James Hansen identifies himself using the term. It is truly worrisome to be living in an age when such a prominent climate scientist sees his role in this way – and sees himself as having uncovered information of such importance that he cannot remain an adviser on the political sidelines. Storms of My Grandchildren is the most frightening thing I have ever read, and may end up being one of the most important.

James Hansen explains why we know as much as we do about the climate: not from computerized climate models, but from the evidence of climatic history laid down in ice cores and sediments. The story they tell is one of a dynamic system capable of amplifying small initial changes, and one in which rapid swings have taken place. Hansen identifies the greatest risks from climate change as the destabilization of ice sheets and the loss of biodiversity accompanying the many effects of climate change. On sea level rise, he explains:

If humanity burns most of the fossil fuels, doubling or tripling the preindustrial carbon dioxide level, Earth will surely head toward the ice-free condition, with sea level 75 meters (250 feet) higher than today. It is difficult to say how long it will take for the melting to be complete, but once ice sheet disintegration gets well under way, it will be impossible to stop. (p. 160 hardcover)

Hansen also highlights how positive feedback effects could lead to a runaway climate change scenario, and how the methane locked up in permafrost and methane clathrates has the potential to stack a second gigantic warming on top of the anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming, in the event they ever substantially melt:

[T]he world, humanity, has reached a fork in the road; we are faced with a choice of potential paths for the future. One path has global fossil fuel emissions declining at a pace, dictated by what the science is telling us, that defuses the amplifying feedbacks and stabilizes climate. The other path is more or less business as usual, in which case amplifying feedbacks are expected to come into play and climate change will begin to spin out of our control. (p. 120 hardcover)

In the most extreme case, in which all coal and unconventional oil and gas are burned, the stacked-up positive feedbacks could be sufficient to boil away the oceans, eventually leaving Earth in a state similar to that now inhabited by Venus, a planet formerly adorned with liquid water before a brightening sun induced runaway climate change there.

In addition to the scientific story, Hansen tells some of his own: about the censorship he witnessed at NASA, about his recent civil disobedience actions against mountaintop removal coal mining, about is perceptions of American politics, and about the grandchildren whose prospects have left him so concerned. Sometimes, these asides can seem secondary to the main thrust of the book, though they do underscore the extent to which this is an impassioned personal plea, not a technical scientific assessment. The insight into the scientific process and the operation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are also interesting.

The most dubious part of the book may be Hansen’s optimism for fourth-generation fast breeder reactors. He highlights their possible advantages, namely in terms of stretching our uranium fuel supplies, but doesn’t give serious consideration to the practical and economic issues with a massive nuclear deployment. He is also overly pessimistic about renewable forms of energy. I would recommend that he take a look at David Mackay’s excellent book on different routes to a zero-carbon energy future. People who read Hansen’s book may also be well-advised to do so.

Hansen makes some key points about climate policy: notably, that emissions targets and cap-and-trade schemes are meaningless, if governments continue to allow coal use and the exploitation of unconventional oil and gas to continue. Those are the fuels that contain enough carbon to threaten all life on Earth; meaningful climate policy must, among other things, ensure that they remain underground. As an alternative to cap-and-trade schemes that are potentially open to manipulation and which offer no incentive to cut faster than prescribed by the cap, Hansen endorses a fee and dividend system where a tax is applied to all fossil fuels at the point of production or import. His overall view is not so different from the fantasy climate change policy I wrote earlier, though I hadn’t been fully aware of all the risks Hansen enumerates when I wrote it.

In the end, Hansen has provided as clear and compelling a warning as anybody could ask for. We are putting the planet in peril and endangering the lives and prospects of future generations in a deeply immoral way. Governments are misleading people with the sense that they are handling the problem when, in reality, even states taking climate change seriously are doing nowhere near enough to ensure that catastrophic or runaway climate change goes not occur. We need to change the energy basis of our society, and keep the carbon in coal and unconventional fossil fuels in the ground. In so doing, we may be able to stop the warming we are inducing, before it generates the devastating feedbacks that are the key message of Hansen’s book.

Those interested in reading this book should consider taking me up on my offer for a free copy. For those unwilling to commit the time to go through a 275-page book, Hansen has a more concise presentation online in PDF form.

Partly prompted by this book, I am in the middle of starting up a new personal project, intended to help with the planet-wide coal phaseout that is necessary. I will make more information on it public, once it is developed further.

[16 February 2010] Now that I have a fuller understanding of the importance of not burning coal and unconventional fossil fuels, because of their cumulative climatic impact, I have launched a group blog on the topic: BuryCoal.com. Please consider having a look or contributing.

Climate book offer

Having personally populated a small library full of books on climate change, I can say with some authority that James Hansen’s book Storms Of My Grandchildren makes a substantial contribution to the debate, partly because of the clarity of his thinking and expression.

As such, and in the interests of improving debate here, I am willing to make the following offer:

Basically, if you are an active member of this community and you will read the book, I will send you a copy.

More specifically:

  1. People requesting a copy must have actively and constructively participated in past discussions on this site (to be judged by me alone)
  2. They must also be willing to read the book, or pay me back for the book and shipping in the event that they do not.
  3. Copies will probably be shipped to people via the US, Canadian, or UK versions of Amazon. I may send them by another means, if a cheaper alternative is available, however.
  4. Any copies shipped outside those places will be shipped at the expense of the recipient.
  5. To begin with, I will pay for no more than eight copies.
  6. I reserve the right to cancel the offer at any time.

People who can afford to are encouraged to buy the book themselves, rather than take advantage of this offer. Hardcover copies are on Amazon for $19.44 Canadian.

[Update: 5 February 2010] My review of Hansen’s book is online.

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…

In their attempt to express how important philosophical ideas relate to jokes, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein are largely successful. Indeed, their hypothesis that there is a relationship between the philosophical and the joking mentality ends up seeming like a plausible one, as jokes are used to illustrate issues in metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of religion, existentialism, the philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, relativity, and meta-philosophy.

Some of the jokes in Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes do feel a touch dated – with a strong emphasis on somewhat off-colour jokes based around traditional attitudes towards sexuality. Still, the book is a fun, quick read and worth a look if you are looking for some light-hearted yet academic contemplation.

Bright-Sided

From Oprah to New Age philosophy, ‘positive thinking’ has become a hugely influential movement in business circles, the religious sphere, in pop medicine, and elsewhere. In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich makes the case that the movement is poorly thought out and damaging. Her arguments are convincing, especially when it comes to situations where positive thinking is used to blame the victim when they suffer as the result of developments beyond their control: be it the movement towards corporate downsizing (which corresponded with the rise of motivational speakers in the workplace) or the unjustified assertion that cancer patients are responsible for their own worsening or recovery, on the basis of the mental attitudes they maintain.

Ehrenreich highlights how relentless optimism leads to dangerous groupthink, in which risks are downplayed and those who raise legitimate worries are sidelined. She provides ample evidence that these factors played a role in the inflation of the global house price bubble, and have continued to have important economic and political effects. These include the weird state of deluded isolation in which society’s richest people now reside. She also spends considerable time discussing the warped theology in which god is seen as a sort of mail-order service, happy to send you whatever good things (houses, cars, promotions) you are able to ‘manifest’ for yourself, simply by fervently desiring them.

Positive thinking involves a weird reversal, when it comes to dealing with risks. They cease to be external (concern that your company might fire you to improve their short-term profitability) and become entirely internal (fears about what your state of mind might do to you). It is also tied fundamentally to the notion that happiness is not most important in itself, but rather insofar as it influences events: “Nothing underscores the lingering Calvinism of positive psychology more than this need to put happiness to work – as a means to health and achievement, or what the positive thinkers call ‘success.'” The former tendency puts people in danger of worrying about the wrong things, while the latter strategy puts them at risk of seeking to achieve particular outcomes in nonsensical ways. That is especially dangerous when it comes to making big purchases on credit, firm in your belief that the universe will provide you with the means of dealing with it later.

Ehrenreich’s points are well-taken, though the book can be a bit tedious to read at times. There are also some partial contradictions. It is repeatedly asserted that there is no medical evidence that thinking positively improves health outcomes, yet it is taken as plausible that George Beecher was able to speed his demise through negative thinking. In the course of her analysis on the medical evidence, Ehrenreich claims to be “not in a position to evaluate” evidence that those with a positive outlook may have some protection against heart disease, but is seemingly happy to evaluate research on other illnesses that confirms her hypothesis.

All told, Ehrenreich makes important points about the poisonous institutional culture that accompanies an excessive focus on positivism – and the view that individuals are almost entirely responsible for what happens to them. Her concluding call for ‘realistic’ thinking is certainly appropriate enough, though perhaps she does not go far enough in suggesting how the empire of positive thinking she has mapped the outlines of might be deconstructed. As the world continues to grapple with real problems, magical thinking cannot be a substitute for dispassionate analysis, risk management, and contingency planning. How we get from our world to one more like that, however, remains mysterious.

Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places

Dylan Prazak, wide angle

Bill Streever’s book takes a meandering and often macabre journey through various facts and stories about the world’s chilled regions: discussing everything from ground squirrel hibernation to the fatalities that resulted from the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard of 1888. While it contains a lot of highly interesting information, the book’s non-linear structure is distracting and contributes to its repetitiveness. Had Streever stuck to a conventional structure with chapters focused on different topics, the result would probably have been better.

Streever is at his best when discussing the human suffering brought on by cold, and the ingenious ways by which animals have learned to survive in it. The story of the Arctic caterpillars that freeze solid every winter, and take ten years to eat enough to undergo metamorphosis, is a poignant one. So too are Streever’s excellent descriptions of snow and feathers as insulating materials, as well as frostbite and hypothermia as unwanted consequences of extreme cold. The book has an entertaining habit of pointing out odd coincidences. For instance, readers will discover what a certain volcanic eruption has to do with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mormonism, and the invention of the bicycle.

Cold gives a fairly cursory treatment of climate change: mentioning it fairly often, but not getting into great detail. Streever takes it as a given that human greenhouse gas emissions will forever and substantially alter the world’s frozen places, and does not devote any time or attention to the kind of actions humanity could take if it wished to preserve the polar ice caps, glaciers, etc. The author acknowledges how his own jet-setting lifestyle is contributing to the destruction of the places that interest him so, but never takes time to really contemplate alternative behaviour for himself or humanity as a whole.

All told, Cold is well worth the couple of hours it takes to read. While some judicious editing would have been welcome, Streever’s book does manage to convey an appropriate sense of both curiosity and visceral dread about the importance that cold has played in our warming world.

Vancouver update, and travel options

Laurier Avenue Bridge, Ottawa

The last few days of Vancouver downtime have been really enjoyable. It is impossible to disentangle the extent to which the enjoyment is the product of broader and deeper networks of friends here, and the extent to which it arises from characteristics essential to the city.

Tristan is on his way back to Ontario via train. While it seems to be a significantly more carbon-intensive way to travel, it is undeniably infinitely more interesting looking than the bus. He has already provided good photographic evidence of that. In my experience, the bus trip offers virtually nothing worth photographing during short winter days. Perhaps one day we will have low-carbon trains, and thus a way of going cross-country that is both environmentally responsible and tolerably pleasant and interesting.

I have been reading an excellent book and play: Tom Stoppard’s wonderful Arcadia (combining amusing talk of sex and science) and Bill Streever’s Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places. The latter offers an astonishing contrast between stories of success and failure in extreme cold: caterpillars that freeze every winter and take ten years to achieve metamorphosis, versus the final journal entries of doomed expeditions, documenting how the men died one at a time.

Less than four more days, and I will be back on the bus.

Crush the Cell

Covered bridge at night, Vermont

Michael Sheenan’s Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves covers ground that overlaps with that of Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent and Securing the City. Namely, the history of Al Qaeda in relation to the United States, and the question of what sort of policies the United States should adopt in response to terrorism. Sheehan brings an insider’s perspective, having served as New York’s Deputy Commissioner for counterterrorism. While Sheehan provides a lot of information and tries to argue a few key points, the book succeeds more as a source of raw information than as a source of analysis. In particular, Sheehan fails to fully justify his views that Al Qaeda will fizzle out in a few decades, and fails to provide a comparative justification for why targeting cells is the most effective way of undermining terrorist plots while avoiding unwanted secondary effects.

Sheehan covers a number of important and interesting topics: methods for counterterrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement; the (limited) competence of Al Qaeda operatives; the risks that arise then officials practice ‘cover your ass’ security; the significance of weapons of mass destruction; torture and human rights; and the importance of not granting terrorists the psychological advantages that arise when we allow ourselves to be terrorized. In the last of those, he echoes a point well-made by Bruce Schneier. Sheehan also provides an insider’s perspective on the controversial rebuilding of the former World Trade Center site, including why construction has been so slow to begin.

Among the three books I have recently read on this subject, Securing the City probably provides the most insight into effective counterterrorism strategies developed and deployed in New York, while Ghost may be the most compelling personal account (though one lacking in balance). Crush the Cell occupies a middle territory – worth reading for those who want even more details and examples than they have found from other sources, but probably not essential reading for those only moderately interested in the subject.

What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Vermont farm

Written by a high school science teacher, Greg Craven’s What’s the Worst That Could Happen? A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate is a worthwhile and unusual addition to the catalogue of books on climate change. Craven’s chosen task is not to determine whether climate scientists are right in their projections of what human activity is and will do to the climate; rather, he is trying to prepare readers to make the best choice, given the uncertainty that will always exist.

This is the same basic message he popularized in a series of viral videos, the first and last of which are especially worth watching:

I do have one slight quibble with both. Craven’s decision grid suggests that we will eventually be able to look back and know if we made the right choice. I don’t think that’s true. If we take aggressive action and stop climate change, we may never know with certainty just how bad it would have been if we had ignored it. No matter how sophisticated they become, simulations can never give us total certainty, and we don’t have another planet with which to run an experiment. Similarly, if we take no action and climate change proves catastrophic, we will never know for sure what level of action would have been sufficient to stop it – or whether doing so was still possible at any particular point in time.

Craven’s approach is based around heuristics: examining the ways in which people make decisions, taking into consideration pitfalls like confirmation bias, and then developing an approach to make an intelligent choice. In this case, it involves developing a way to roughly rank the credibility of sources, look at who is saying what, and complete a decision grid that shows the consequences of climate change either being or not being a major problem and humanity either taking or not taking major action. His own conclusion is that taking action unnecessarily isn’t likely to be exceptionally economically damaging, and can be considered a prudent course for ensuring that the worst does not happen.

On the question of why action has not yet been taken, Craven focuses primarily on human psychology. We respond to threats that are immediate, visible, and have a hostile agent behind them. Since climate change is none of these things, it doesn’t trigger strong responses in us. Cognitive factors also help explain why people are so confused about the state of climate science, though individual failings in information assessment are accompanied by the failure of the media to pass along good information effectively.

Craven concludes that raising political will is the key action that needs to be taken, and that cutting individual emissions is of very secondary importance. Like many others, he draws on the analogy of WWII to show what the United States is capable of achieving when it has the determination.

Some readers may find the book’s informal style and fill-in-the-blanks exercises a bit annoying, or feel that they trivialize the issues at hand. That being said, Craven has produced a very accessible book that recasts the climate change debate in a valuable new way: evaluating what choice to make, under uncertainty, rather than trying to determine authoritatively who is right. For those wishing to grapple with the practical question of what ought to be done about climate change, this book is well worth reading.

Climate Cover-Up

Guitar playing man

James Hoggan’s Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming is a valuable exposé of the efforts that have been made by self-interested actors to prevent political action on climate change, by manipulating the public debate and confusing people about the strength of the science. Written by a Canadian public relations professional, and written with a focus on actors and events in Canada, Hoggan’s book examines how the media has been involved in the debate, how companies have worked to create false grassroots campaigns (‘astroturfing’), the role played by think tanks, the use of lawsuits to intimidate and silence critics, the ‘echo chamber’ effect wherein false claims are endlessly repeated by sympathetic sources, and more. Hoggan makes a convincing case that status quo actors – particularly petrochemical firms – have been working for decades to keep the public confused, and keep legislators inactive.

Hoggan provides both logical and documentary evidence to back up his claims – pointing out things like how most of the scientists that actively deny the consensus view of climate change are being funded as advocates, not as scientists:

The Intermountain Rural Electric Association isn’t paying Pat Michaels to go back into his lab and do research helping the world to a better understanding of how human activities are affecting the climate. The coal-fired utility owners are paying him to “stand up against the alarmists and bring a balance to the discussion.”

Hoggan provides many specific examples of malfeasance, and argues that the public relations personal directing the campaign against action on climate change are often indifferent to whether the claims they are making are true or false. They are tested for how well they affect public opinion, not how well they represent the reality of the situation.

Hoggan does sometimes present information in a misleading way. For instance, he compares the risk of climate change with the risk of car and house insurance, and says that: “in both cases the risk of disaster is significantly less than the greater than 90 percent certainty that scientists ascribe to the climate crisis.” He is referring to how the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report concluded that: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.” and defined ‘very likely’ as cases where “expert judgment and statistical analysis of a body of evidence” support an assessed probability of over 90%. The IPCC was saying that there is a scientific consensus that there is a 90% chance that the unequivocal warming that has been observed has anthropogenic causes, not that the “risk of disaster” is 90%. The question of how serious the consequences of warming will be is distinct from the question of what is causing warming. Another odd error is one sentence written as though the consulting company McKinsey was a person: “When McKinsey talks about a carbon revolution, he strikes the right tone.”

That said, Climate Cover-Up succeeds in its key purpose: revealing that not everyone is engaging in the climate debate in an honest or ethical manner. The scientific consensus that climate change is real and risky is exceedingly strong, and yet the public and policy-makers have been very effectively confused and encouraged to delay action. By revealing the extent to which the debate has been manipulated, Hoggan’s book will hopefully contribute to the eventual improvement of public understanding of climate change, and the development of a will to act sufficiently strong to sort out the problem before the worst potential consequences become inevitable. Hoggan also continues that effort through DeSmogBlog – a site he created to provide ongoing updates on climate change misinformation campaigns.

[Update: 13 October 2010] Another good book on the same topic is Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.