The Earth and I – is climate change moving too fast for a new book on climate change?

boing
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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/28/the-earth-and-i-is-climate.html

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So the premise is that books on climate change are too dated by the time they are published to be effective…

…and this person made their case…

…in a book.

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I think the person making that case is Ben Marks, and he’s making the case in a blog post on BoingBoing by discussing this particular book.

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Geez they added HFC’s to the Montreal Protocol on October 15th 2016. Like barely more than a month ago.

If Ben knew anything about publishing he’d know that this book was likely penned at least a year ago.

It’s ironic, but it’s hardly worth the scolding.

If I was going to piss and moan about every dumb thing said about biology in books I’d be dehydrated and hoarse.

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So it is. I got the impression that the book, The Earth and I, was about dated publications rather than this being a review of The Earth and I.

I hadn’t seen an honestly critical assessment, instead of a thinly disguised ad, of a product on this site for so long that I got confused.

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Critical assessment ends with example of glaring outdated information.

Amazon link provided anyway.

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I didn’t read it as a scolding, but almost a lament that things are moving so fast that books are literally out of date by the time they reach book shelves (well, a day after)

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The fact that HFCs are extraordinarily potent greenhouse gases has been known for a very long time so Lovelock’s suggestion that they’re “less harmful to the planetary environment” was only correct if you take a very narrow interpretation of what is harmful to the environment.

I’d be more interested to hear what he’s got to say more generally about climate change in this book because a lot of what he’s been saying recently is, quite frankly, pretty extreme and counterproductive.

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don’t you mean… disappointed?

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I was reading about the difficulty of finding a substitute for CFCs and HFCs in heat pumps — trying to find something that wasn’t itself a global warming gas.

Is there something intrinsic about the physical property of good heat pump gasses that also happens to make them particularly good at trapping the Earth’s heat?

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