[V5Y]⋙ Descargar Gratis Hot Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth Mark Hertsgaard 9780618826124 Books

Hot Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth Mark Hertsgaard 9780618826124 Books

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Hot Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth Mark Hertsgaard 9780618826124 Books

While this book is well written it was poorly researched and fact checking was not apparent in much of the book. The author has no background or training or education in the sciences and it shows in his ignorance and his biases. He will degrade and fault what he calls "environmentalists" throughout the book those these are the people that have been trying for more than half a century to get people in society and in government to understand that you cannot deal with only one part of what is a system that is more complex than the human mind can grasp and make piecemeal changes. Shipping water more efficiently from the north of California to the south is not only about providing water for farms and golf courses and swimming pools, but also about removing water from wetlands that protect the coast and removing water from rivers that support populations of fish that are an important food source, or changing the salinity of bays so they become toxic to shellfish and shrimp. It is also about changing the vegetation and the micro climates piece by piece throughout the state - a concept with which the author is also unaware. In addition the moving of water from places like the Colorado River and Mono Lake and northern California to the south is the single largest consumer of electricity in the state. It takes a lot of power to move water at 8 lbs. per gallon over the mountains to get it to the south.

It extends to the author's lack of understanding how the privatization of public transportation with the auto, gas, and tire companies conspiring to purchase every electric light rail system in the USA and replace it with cars and buses using their products. This has also been driven by the federal government's funding of interstate and local highways throughout the country. While countries in Europe were building light rail and high speed train systems and integrating them with public housing, in the USA where the private sector was in control, freeways were built instead and at public expense with the resulting suburban sprawl and cities where more than 50% of the land is taken up for moving or parking or storing cars. This asphalt footprint is why cities are becoming hotter by the year and requiring more and more energy for air conditioning.

The author's lack of fact checking is quite apparent with his quoting a geology professor who blamed the sprawl of cities in California to the passage of property tax legislation in 1978. This is wrong on so many levels. For starters the sprawl accelerated tremendously in the late 1960's more than a decade before Proposition 13 went into effect. What the author does not understand is that the California state department, Caltrans, spend 99% of its budget on highway construction and maintenance to this day. This department is overseen by the California Transportation Planning advisory committee appointees. The members of the committee have consisted entirely of people from companies engaged in highway construction, real estate, and the automobile industries. During the 1960's a new freeway was opened year after year in California and even before the freeways opened for motorists there were developers building homes along each side. Desert land worth nothing became home lots worth many millions of dollars thanks to the spending of federal and state funds on the new freeways. These new freeways also encouraged people to live further away from their place of employment and to buy more cars, gas, tires, etc. so a win win for the industries involved with transportation planning in the state. This continues with the proposed high speed train whose route is going to be through the least populated sections of the state where it will serve far fewer people and yet provide enormous windfall profits for land speculators and residential construction firms.

The author decries consumer choices and gives the example that televisions with plasma screens require 3 times as much electricity and what a disaster that will cause when everyone buys one. The reality is that the plasma screen market was always held back by the weight of the screens and their lack of reliability (electronics do not like heat and plasma TV's are very hot internally). Now households have LCD screens that were first backlit with fluorescent tubes and use a great deal less energy than their old CRT television and the current generation of LCD screens are backlit with LED's and so use even less power. And unlike the author's contention, making something more efficient does not increase its consumption. Do people watch more TV with a LCD screen or drive twice as much if they own a Prius? Hertsgaard and his editor really did not think this through or bother to fact check such assertions.

Moving jobs overseas, along with US capital and expertise, has also had an environmental as well as an environmental impact which is overlooked by the book. As a child everything I ate or wore and every appliance and piece of furniture was made in the United States. Now very little of what I eat and wear is made in the USA and my TV and clothes washer and microwave were manufactured in Korea. The rise of Wal-Mart has also been a factor with all its products coming into the country from Asia and so via container ships. A single massive container ship produces as much emissions as 50 million cars and this impact from 6,000 such ships currently in operation is one of the larger contributors to global warming.

Food consumption is another problem created in large part by our government. Under Nixon the grain subsidies were greatly increased to provide agri businesses with cheap corn and cheap feed for animals with an end result that the per capita consumption of beef is 60% higher in the US than in Europe. Cows require 28 times more land to produce than pork or chicken, 11 times more water and results in five times more climate-warming emissions. When compared to staples like potatoes, wheat, and rice, the impact of beef per calorie is even more extreme, requiring 160 times more land and producing 11 times more greenhouse gases. Fortunately many people are becoming aware of the negative health impacts of beef and dairy consumption which along with sugar are increasing rates of obesity and colon cancer and type II diabetes, and so are reducing their consumption of these products.

This is an example of areas where the author has failed to provide any information or guidance as to how individuals can reduce their own carbon footprint. Even the steps of driving less, not jetting overseas to go hiking, and abstaining from eating beef and drinking milk would contribute greatly. Car owners can buy smaller and more fuel efficient cars, replace tungsten lamps with LED ones, buy locally produced goods when possible, and they can put solar panels on their roof.

Hertsgaard's book is good on the what but poor in terms of the why and ignores the actions best taken by individuals. While I can understand why it may be difficult to propose actions to be taken it is inexcusable not to even make an effort to do so with a book on the impacts of global climate change.


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Hot Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth Mark Hertsgaard 9780618826124 Books Reviews

A must read for anyone interested in learning more about the environment, or even just a good book!
Mark focuses on how communities will have to adapt to the climate change that is already unavoidable.
It was a pretty decent book, if a bit slow in spots.
Thoroughly researched. The five years that have passed since publication have shown some progress in avoiding the author's worst fears of the future. e.g. "Peak Oil" has been avoided for another generation or two. Emissions have stopped increasing. We have new tools and technologies in the fight to reduce greenhouse gases LED lights, hybrid cars, gas as cheap as coal, solar panels cheap enough to be a feasible alternative, which they were not in 2010.
I really appreciated the information in this book, particularly the many discussions about adaptation to climate change with government officials in the areas covered. I was wondering about areas not covered . . . I don't remember much about Africa for example . . . maybe the focus was intended to 'wake up' and get moving some of us in the richer more industrialized northern countries, rather than to cover the consequences of climate change on those who are contributing less to the damage our fossil fuel use is incurring on the environment.
We are now at least a decade into what journalist Mark Hertsgaard terms the "second era of global warming," which began sometime around the turn of the 20th century. As he writes, "The battle to prevent dangerous climate change was now over; the race to survive it has begun."

Hertsgaard probably has as broad and deep an understanding of global warming and its consequences in the form of climate change of any nonscientist on the planet. He has been writing about the topic for more than two decades and has interviewed most of the major players in climate science climate-related government policy not just for this book, which involved five years of travel around the world, but for Earth Odyssey, a widely read investigation published in 1999 that reflected seven years of travel. The man knows whereof he writes!

Hot is the author's attempt to find a hopeful path forward through the gathering storm of climate change. Throughout, he ponders the life his young daughter, Chiara, will face in adulthood. Much of Hot is written in an optimistic tone. Hertsgaard explores a laundry list of policies and procedures that, if widely implemented, will permit humanity to forestall the extremes of climate change and to adapt to its nonetheless unavoidable consequences. Some of the practices he touts -- painting roofs white and planting trees in African fields, for example -- could, in fact, achieve a great deal if universally employed. His theme is "Avoid the unmanageable, manage the unavoidable." Distinguishing between mitigation -- efforts to reduce carbon emissions -- and adaptation -- finding ways to adjust to the changing climate -- Hertsgaard devotes most of the book to the latter. Previous writing on global warming has tended to focus on mitigation, which heavily involves government and corporate policy. Adaption consists largely of changing the way people and communities behave.

Unfortunately, though, the context in which he writes is not encouraging. We live in a world in which massive corporations spend millions to protect their short-term profits regardless of the consequences, major news media reflect the views of their corporate owners, the overwhelming majority of people deny the obvious, and policymakers demonstrate their affinity for the art of the possible rather than showing true leadership. To a knowledgeable reader, much of the optimism in Hot seems forced.

What it all boils down to is this "We face a towering challenge. Countries that today are all but addicted to fossil fuels must quit carbon within the next two to three decades. Deforestation and other climate-damaging activities must also be brought to a halt worldwide. And even poor and emerging economies must halt almost all emissions by 2050. Yet even if we manage all this, it will give us merely a two-out-of-three chance to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees C about preindustrial levels, itself an achievement of dubious merit, for it will mean the lost of most of the world's coral reefs, the disappearance of most of its mountain snowpacks, and enough sea level rise, eventually, to inundate the existing coastlines on every continent."

The facts are disturbingly grim even if the human race somehow manages to come to grips with the existential threat of climate change and to do everything recommended by the authors of the most alarming scientific reports, we are already locked into at least 30 years, and possibly as many as 50 years, of serious trouble. "Climate change will worsen existing conflicts over water supplies, energy sources, and weather-induced migration . . . Economic prosperity is also endangered. Approximately 25 percent of the gross national product of the United States is at risk from extreme weather events, according to the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union."

One of the greatest threats to civilization lies in our oceans. "Three feet of sea level rise over the next hundred years -- which is near the low end of what scientists now expect -- will pose enormous challenges . . . [S]ome scientists believe our civilization could experience three feet of sea level rise within the next fifty years."

Perhaps equally problematic is the certainty of increasing drought. Much of Africa, a large swath of South Asia, and large portions of the United States, especially California, the Southwest, and the Great Plains, face intensifying water shortages.

There is no lack of horror stories available to illustrate the havoc these trends can create. However, over and above all the computer-modeled predictions for a steady increase in global temperatures over the coming decades is a much more horrific possibility the potential that some unanticipated combination of circumstances will trigger "positive feedbacks that, in the worst case, could kick off some type of runaway greenhouse dynamics."

As Hertsgaard explains, "Unfortunately, there is ample precedent for this kind of abrupt shift into climate chaos. Although the human mind tends to think in gradual, linear terms, ice records and other historical data show that climate shifts, when they occur, tend to happen suddenly and exponentially."

Worrying about rising temperatures and their consequences is bad enough. But it's the potential of a "sudden and exponential" shift that keeps me awake nights.

(From [...])
While this book is well written it was poorly researched and fact checking was not apparent in much of the book. The author has no background or training or education in the sciences and it shows in his ignorance and his biases. He will degrade and fault what he calls "environmentalists" throughout the book those these are the people that have been trying for more than half a century to get people in society and in government to understand that you cannot deal with only one part of what is a system that is more complex than the human mind can grasp and make piecemeal changes. Shipping water more efficiently from the north of California to the south is not only about providing water for farms and golf courses and swimming pools, but also about removing water from wetlands that protect the coast and removing water from rivers that support populations of fish that are an important food source, or changing the salinity of bays so they become toxic to shellfish and shrimp. It is also about changing the vegetation and the micro climates piece by piece throughout the state - a concept with which the author is also unaware. In addition the moving of water from places like the Colorado River and Mono Lake and northern California to the south is the single largest consumer of electricity in the state. It takes a lot of power to move water at 8 lbs. per gallon over the mountains to get it to the south.

It extends to the author's lack of understanding how the privatization of public transportation with the auto, gas, and tire companies conspiring to purchase every electric light rail system in the USA and replace it with cars and buses using their products. This has also been driven by the federal government's funding of interstate and local highways throughout the country. While countries in Europe were building light rail and high speed train systems and integrating them with public housing, in the USA where the private sector was in control, freeways were built instead and at public expense with the resulting suburban sprawl and cities where more than 50% of the land is taken up for moving or parking or storing cars. This asphalt footprint is why cities are becoming hotter by the year and requiring more and more energy for air conditioning.

The author's lack of fact checking is quite apparent with his quoting a geology professor who blamed the sprawl of cities in California to the passage of property tax legislation in 1978. This is wrong on so many levels. For starters the sprawl accelerated tremendously in the late 1960's more than a decade before Proposition 13 went into effect. What the author does not understand is that the California state department, Caltrans, spend 99% of its budget on highway construction and maintenance to this day. This department is overseen by the California Transportation Planning advisory committee appointees. The members of the committee have consisted entirely of people from companies engaged in highway construction, real estate, and the automobile industries. During the 1960's a new freeway was opened year after year in California and even before the freeways opened for motorists there were developers building homes along each side. Desert land worth nothing became home lots worth many millions of dollars thanks to the spending of federal and state funds on the new freeways. These new freeways also encouraged people to live further away from their place of employment and to buy more cars, gas, tires, etc. so a win win for the industries involved with transportation planning in the state. This continues with the proposed high speed train whose route is going to be through the least populated sections of the state where it will serve far fewer people and yet provide enormous windfall profits for land speculators and residential construction firms.

The author decries consumer choices and gives the example that televisions with plasma screens require 3 times as much electricity and what a disaster that will cause when everyone buys one. The reality is that the plasma screen market was always held back by the weight of the screens and their lack of reliability (electronics do not like heat and plasma TV's are very hot internally). Now households have LCD screens that were first backlit with fluorescent tubes and use a great deal less energy than their old CRT television and the current generation of LCD screens are backlit with LED's and so use even less power. And unlike the author's contention, making something more efficient does not increase its consumption. Do people watch more TV with a LCD screen or drive twice as much if they own a Prius? Hertsgaard and his editor really did not think this through or bother to fact check such assertions.

Moving jobs overseas, along with US capital and expertise, has also had an environmental as well as an environmental impact which is overlooked by the book. As a child everything I ate or wore and every appliance and piece of furniture was made in the United States. Now very little of what I eat and wear is made in the USA and my TV and clothes washer and microwave were manufactured in Korea. The rise of Wal-Mart has also been a factor with all its products coming into the country from Asia and so via container ships. A single massive container ship produces as much emissions as 50 million cars and this impact from 6,000 such ships currently in operation is one of the larger contributors to global warming.

Food consumption is another problem created in large part by our government. Under Nixon the grain subsidies were greatly increased to provide agri businesses with cheap corn and cheap feed for animals with an end result that the per capita consumption of beef is 60% higher in the US than in Europe. Cows require 28 times more land to produce than pork or chicken, 11 times more water and results in five times more climate-warming emissions. When compared to staples like potatoes, wheat, and rice, the impact of beef per calorie is even more extreme, requiring 160 times more land and producing 11 times more greenhouse gases. Fortunately many people are becoming aware of the negative health impacts of beef and dairy consumption which along with sugar are increasing rates of obesity and colon cancer and type II diabetes, and so are reducing their consumption of these products.

This is an example of areas where the author has failed to provide any information or guidance as to how individuals can reduce their own carbon footprint. Even the steps of driving less, not jetting overseas to go hiking, and abstaining from eating beef and drinking milk would contribute greatly. Car owners can buy smaller and more fuel efficient cars, replace tungsten lamps with LED ones, buy locally produced goods when possible, and they can put solar panels on their roof.

Hertsgaard's book is good on the what but poor in terms of the why and ignores the actions best taken by individuals. While I can understand why it may be difficult to propose actions to be taken it is inexcusable not to even make an effort to do so with a book on the impacts of global climate change.