Rating: WARTY!
Errata:
"humanity can solve the carbon and carbon problem" ??!
"but is now is now more" makes no sense.
"develop a successor to the Kyoto Prptocol is planned for Paris in December 2015" misspelling of protocol and poor grammar.
"such as improving automobile engine efficiency to reduce mileage per gallon" improve mileage per gallon, surely?!
"Too many cooks," the old saying has it, "spoils the broth." person mismatch.
"Of that amount $275 llion was spent on the top 1% of patients" million is missing a few letters.
"Michael Grubb has laid out the pathway that successful funding of technological research must follow to move from the beginning, research, to the end, successful implementation and dissemination." This made no sense to me.
"Most of that increase will come from the developing countries, which will account for 90% of the increase, with the Organisation for Economic Co -operation and Development countries (essentially developed countries) contributing only 17%." 107%?
" The IEA has projected a one-third increase in global energy demand between 2011- 2035, with a small decline in the share of fossil fuel from 83% to 76%. Renewables and nuclear energy will meet about 40% of basic demand during that same period." Again maybe I am misunderstanding this, but 76% *or 83%) plus 40% add up to more than 100, unless 'global energy demand' is somehow different from 'basic demand'. If it is, it should be made more clear.
Minor quibble: "between 2011- 2035" To me the hyphen equates to the word 'to' so this reads like 'between 2011 to 2035', whereas it should read 'between 2011 and 2035'. If I were going to use the hyphen, I'd write it as 'from 2011- 2035', but maybe others read it differently.
Note up front that this was an advance review copy and I appreciate the opportunity to read it. What I have identified as problems or potential problems with it may well have been taken care of by the time of publication! That said, this book, properly titled The Five Horsemen of the Modern World: Climate, Food, Water, Disease, and Obesity by Daniel Callahan was a disappointment to me. I usually try to give environmentally themed books a positive review if I can because I think they're tremendously important, but i cannot honestly do that here.
The author has done an impressive amount of work, but what's presented does not appear to be intended as a popular handbook on solutions to important problems facing us in the near future. It's much more of a survey of five major problems which the author sees - problems which will impinge upon us all - and what options have been put forward in attempts at or as suggestions for the mitigation of these problems. As such, it can make for very dense and dry reading. I can't recommend undertaking it unless you're a true devotee of environmental literature, because for me, even that wasn't quite enough.
It was interesting in many ways, but I would not recommend it for casual reading. In addition to this, there were multiple issues with it which drew it out of my favor (for what that's worth!). There were areas that read - to me - like pure gobbledygook. For example, I had no idea what this meant: "Most proposals for mitigation and adaptation change require forging or greatly enhancing government- private sector alliances, a receptive government with public support, industry incentives to take chances with uncertain long-term profit, and multidisciplinary and integrated systems, among others." I'm sure I could have parsed it out and derived the intended meaning if I spent some time on it, but I wasn't willing to spend my time doing the very work I felt the author should have done.
First I want to look at the things which were interesting - or disturbing, depending upon your perspective. They were actually both: interesting for now, and very disturbing for the not-too-distant future. There were many of these. They were not always presented in the most coherent manner, though, which rather robbed them of their power and deluged the reader in statistics rather than an engaging relation of clear facts and opinions. It's hard to get a good feel for a situation when the reader has so many numbers, percentages and assorted facts spit out in short order with little by way of explanation or context.
While the book did a pretty decent job of presenting many disturbing facts, the apparent lack of good solutions was also upsetting; however, some solutions were completely overlooked. For example, we're informed that "Some 80% of all infectious disease in poor countries can be traced to dirty water" and some pertinent issues are discussed, yet one promising solution, from Dean Kamen (the inventor of AutoSyringe, the Segway, and the iBOT Mobility System) went unmentioned. Similarly, and still on the topic of water, I felt that sea-water filtration as a solution to fresh water shortage, was given way too short shrift, being largely dismissed as expensive. Well energy is expensive, but the places where water is often in very short supply are the same ones where solar power can provide abundant low cost energy, and we did get told how cheap that had become. That doesn't solve all the issues with sea water use, but I would have liked to have seen this explored more, given how much water this planet does have available even if it is mixed thoroughly with salt.
I confess that it was with a certain amount of smugness that I read about bottled water, which I do not drink. I learned that "Bottled water is an exceedingly profitable item, vigorously advertised, stoutly defended by its manufacturers, and seeming adored by the public. In 2009 Americans spent $10.6 billion to consume 8.4 million gallons of it. It is a strikingly popular item in upscale restaurants, where it is served at 80% markups." I also read that "A 2006 study found that 17 million barrels of oil a year are required to produce the plastic bottles, while the cost of tap water production is around a thousandth as much" and "Americans drink around 29 gallons of bottled water a year per capita." That's a lot of expensive water being consumed by the very people who have least need of it. One thing which was not explored was the potential health risk in the possibility of leeching of chemicals from plastic water bottles into the water which these people are consuming in such massive quantities.
Aging was another area of interest. While those of us in spoiled-rotten western cultures have access to decent food (though we may not choose to avail ourselves of it), clean water, good healthcare, non of us can escape aging! "In 1975 there were six children for every older person, but by 2035 there will only two." This is another area of concern: how we will take care of our growing aging population when they are going to outnumber the very people who can physically and financially care for them. I would have liked this to have been explored in greater depth.
Climate change was disturbingly summed-up in this section which quoted James Hansen:
with current policies in place we are locked into a rise of between 2 ° C and 5.3 ° C, " adding in an interview that 4 ° C "would be enough to melt all the ice . . . we are now three years away from that point-of-no return.For me, part of the problem with this book was the extensive quotation of the work of others. It felt more like reading a compilation than an original book and very little of what was quoted made much impact upon me, the above being one of the few exceptions.
In addition to those problems, there were assorted issues with grammar and with percentages not adding up. While those are on the author and publisher, another issue, the formatting of the book as read in the Kindle app on my phone which left a lot to be desired, is purely a fault of the app rather than with the book itself. Authors can take steps to mitigate the damage the Kindle conversion process subjects your work to, but this restricts creativity rather a lot. One thing which could have been fixed, I think, would have been to have had the references (with which the text was replete) clickable. It was annoying to read something, see a reference number, and not be able to click to it and click back. In a print book, it's easy to stick your finger between pages and look up a reference, returning to where you left off. It's not possible to do that in a kindle app unless the references are clickable and the book provides a return click to get you back to where you started. Perhaps this will be available in the final published copy, but without having a copy available to me that is close to what's intended to be published (which this book was hopefully!), I can't give an adequate review of those things.
Overall, and while I like, as I said, to review environmental books positively if I can, I wasn't able to do that with this one because it left too much undone and did not leave me feeling better educated afterwards than I had been before. Yes, it was an ARC, but in this electronic age, I felt it could have been in a lot better shape, including a final run-through with a spell-checker. I can't see this appealing to a wide readership, not without being better presented. With all these things in mind I cannot in good faith recommend this book, and I'm sorry for that.
