- ISBN13: 9781555916213
- Condition: USED – VERY GOOD
- Notes:
Product Description
Global warming has become the most important issue for the future of our planet, dominating news headlines and policy discussions. Stop Global Warming turns headlines into action, providing testimony of leading environmental activist Laurie David’s own passionate work and showing how and why others (particularly young people) should get involved in this and other environmental issues. In accessible and inspiring prose, David explains that Global warming is not … More >>
Well, first of all, with China and India the two biggest nations, and the two fastest developing nations, who are both exempt from any Kyoto protocols, building coal power generation plants and buying oil as fast as they can, one thing is completely certain:
All of us in the developed nations can reduce our CO2 emmissions to ZERO without having the slightest effect on the current rate of increase in Greenhouse gasses.
But why do we take it on faith that we would even want too?
The paleoclimatological evidence points out two very significant periods in history since the end of the last Ice Age where the earth was very warm. In each case it was a wetter world. When the first of those periods ended, the Saharan lakes dried up, the flourishing civilization there was scattered, and the Sahara desert was born. In the most recent cooling, the most advanced civilization in North America, the Anasazi, was also destroyed. That cooling period, which we know as the Little Ice Age, may have also wiped out the Mayans, but certainly destroyed the Viking colonies in Greenland when they could no longer grow crops there, and caused the many scattered lakes that dotted the Arabian Penninsula to dry up.
There a few scattered exceptions, but the overall evidence is that these were global effects that made for wetter conditions and were of vast benefit to man.
So is there any evidence that the current warming trends might be making the same alterations to the rainfall in drought stricken areas? Indeed yes. Type in Sahel and rainfall in any search engine to see what is beginning to happen (the Sahel is sub Saharan Africa, where the photos of emaciated babies come from). It’s starting to RAIN!
So before you try to save the beaches at Malibu and Martha’s Vinyard, think of the poor people in Darfur, and how great it would be if this respite from decades of horrible drought wasn’t “fixed” before it really got going.
Rating: 1 / 5
I recieved a signed copy of the book from Laurie David herself and I was instantly hooked from the forward onwards. While most of what she suggests we do to stop global warming is common sense, it’s very interesting nonetheless. She clearly shows much passion for this cause and I d as well.
Rating: 5 / 5
As the reviewer above stated this book is too basic and the suggestions obvious, most people are probably aware of her suggestions. Also, yes it is annoying that someone who admits to taking vacations and trips on private jets and owns two large homes on both coasts (which I am sure she travels to and from in private jets) is lecturing individuals to stop using plastic bags. Her carbon footprint is probably larger than 99% of the most environmentally uncaring individuals (to be clear I mean individuals not companies) in America.
Rating: 1 / 5
We recently heard Laurie David speak and purchased this book later. I can’t say we got much out of it. First, I guess you can say it is compact, but that is because there are only 54 pages of content. Second, if you’ve not lived in a cave for the last year, you have to be somewhat familiar with the basic issue of global warming. I recognize that is largely due to Laurie’s role in An Inconvenient Truth, a defining event in raising public conciousness.
Short advice, spend you money on a donation to NRDC or buy World Changing and skip this book.
Rating: 2 / 5
I had been hoping for some more creative ideas. The book was fairly preachy about the need to combat global warming but since I was already concerned enough to buy the book I didn’t need to be further convinced. Plus, the solutions the book proposed were so basic that unless energy conservation was a totally new concept to the reader there was nothing new. I was very disapointed and if it wasn’t for the energy I would use in sending the book back I wouldn’t have kept it.
Rating: 1 / 5