Books you don’t have to read past the title, Part 2

UPDATE2:  This is not a full review, but a debunking of the primary thesis of the book on the basis of information anyone can access online.  I have now read the book and can say with full confidence that what is online is not entirely representative of the book:  It is even worse than I describe here, with, for instance, some egregious numerical errors and inconsistencies, as I’ll discuss in later posts. In the meantime, you can read this detailed review, “A Fantasy Future,” at the American Scientist by a leading expert on the impact of climate change on cities, who concludes the book “fails on the most important criterion: a good knowledge of the topic under discussion.”

UPDATE1:  The author comments here and I reply.  The author has yet more comments below, including a morbid bet that I reject.

So many bad climate books, so little time.  How thoughtful, then, of an author to save everybody time with a title that lets you know whether or not you should read it.

Of course, the champion of books you don’t have to read past the title is Fred Singer’s lame anti-science treatist, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.  As I noted in “Unstoppable disinformation every 15 minutes from Fred Singer,” the most absurd thing about the book is that the Earth wasn’t actually in a warm trend “” unstoppable or otherwise “” 1500 years ago!  Doh.  [Yes, during the Medieval Warm Period, parts of the earth were a bit warmer, but that peaked (below current temperatures) 1,000 years ago.]

And now we have another time-saving title, from UCLA environmental economist Matthew Kahn, Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future.  Uhh, no — see “Real adaptation is as politically tough as real mitigation, but much more expensive and not as effective in reducing future misery.”

A key “thesis” of this book is that people will just move to northern cities and be fine.  To see how poorly thought out this notion is just start searching the book on Amazon for northern cities.  Yes, the obvious first choice is Moscow, where you will learn on page 7 … wait for it …  “Moscow is unlikely to suffer from extreme heat waves.”  Talk about your badly timed books (see Media wakes up to Hell and High Water: Moscow’s 1000-year heat wave and “Pakistan’s Katrina”).

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If the Tea-Party-led Republicans take over the House this November, we won’t just see the end of any possible action on climate change or clean energy.  There is a great likelihood that they will force a shutdown of the government, which will close our national parks, prevent food from being inspected, and stop any government oversight of coal mines or offshore drilling — or clean air and clean water, for that matter.  Think Progress has the back-story.

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Job creation vs. confused causation

Proposition 23 supporters and opponents got together to debate the Proposition at the Sacramento Press Club last Wednesday.  CAP’s Araceli Ruano has the story.

For the Yes on 23 side, Assemblyman Dan Logue from Linda, California took the stage, alternating between arguing that ending AB 32′s environmental protections would improve California’s air and would create jobs for the state.  Tom Steyer, who runs a $20-billion hedge fund out of San Francisco, argued against the Assemblyman, asserting that the AB 32 has created thousands of jobs in the state, as well as improved our air quality.

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The Wonk Room has previously identified seven key U.S. Senate races and eight U.S. House races between a vote for climate action and a global warming denier. Today, the Wonk Room highlights six House races of the most vulnerable champions for climate action. They include three freshman representatives, two elected in 2006, and one veteran congressman, Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA-11), who together represented the swing votes in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act in 2009. Their opponents are right-wing ideologues who parrot the party line that cap-and-trade legislation is a job-killing “energy tax”:

(86%) VA-5 Tom Perriello v Robert Hurt
(84%) MD-1 Frank Kratovil v Andy Harris
(72%) CO-4 Betsy Markey v Cory Gardner
(67%) NY-19 John Hall v Nan Hayworth
(63%) PA-11 Paul Kanjorski v Lou Barletta
(61%) NH-1 Carol Shea-Porter v Frank Guinta

The full list of key House climate races identified by the Wonk Room is available here.

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“You must realize that having to portray an illegitimate debate fries the circuits of the mainstream press.”

Here’s how The Economist introduced its interview of Jay Rosen:

JAY ROSEN is a professor of journalism at New York University and an insightful critic of the media. Earlier this year he wrote an essay on “the actual ideology of our political press”, which we praised and discussed on this blog. Mr Rosen has a blog of his own, PressThink, and his work has been published in Columbia Journalism Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. He has also written a book, titled “What Are Journalists For?“, about the rise of the civic-journalism movement. This week we asked him some questions over email about the press and its failings.

Rosen wrote a terrific comment for my August 29 post, “What’s the difference between climate science and climate journalism? The former is self-correcting, the latter has become self-destructive.”  Since it was #52, I suspect many missed it, so I’ll repost it below.

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Ancient seeds in Mexico help fight warming effects:  Climate change could bring lower yields, food crisis

EL BATAN, Mexico – More than 500 years after Spanish priests brought wheat seeds to Mexico to make wafers for the Catholic Mass, those seeds may bring a new kind of salvation to farmers hit by global warming.

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What a contrast. In a year that’s on track to be our planet’s hottest on record, America turned “climate change” into a four-letter word that many U.S. politicians won’t even dare utter in public. If this were just some parlor game, it wouldn’t matter. But the totally bogus “discrediting” of climate science has had serious implications. For starters, it helped scuttle Senate passage of the energy-climate bill needed to scale U.S.-made clean technologies, leaving America at a distinct disadvantage in the next great global industry. And that brings me to the contrast: While American Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue, the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.

The NYT’s Tom Friedman continues to do some of the best reporting on the economic consequences of the GOP decision to block even the most business-oriented Republican-originated strategies for averting catastrophic climate change and promoting clean energy jobs (see “Invented here, sold there”).

He has op-ed from Tianjin, China, “Aren’t we clever?” that is worth excerpting at length:

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