Engineering Response to Global Climate Change: Planning a Research and Development Agenda

Rating:
Summary: unique, competent, extremely useful
Review: If you have a genuine interest in climate change issues you may wish to make a serious effort to find this book despite its steep price and limited distribution. It addresses the basic situation in a forthright fashion and in terms familiar and accessible to a general engineering or physical science audience, in brief. The analysis is succinct and fair, even going so far as to point out (as I myself try to do) that the worse-than-consensus scenarios get much less attention than the better-than-consensus ones. However, the focus of the book is not the issue of climate sensitivity, nor the pseudo-issue of "whether to believe in global warming". The book focuses on realistic responses and realistic time frames in which to accomplish them. Rigorous arguments are presented, not avoiding recourse to mathematics, chemistry and physics. References to primary peer reviewed literature are provided in abundance. Some of the better informed gadflies on this issue will be gratified to see that substantial space is given both to energy demand reduction and to geo-engineering solutions. (Proponents of these approaches often seem to find them mutually exclusive, which of course an engineering point of view as presented in this volume does not.) This book addresses the serious matter of climate change causes and responses with appropriate respect for the scales involved, in all respects. The general public has difficulty absorbing that an issue can be timely without being urgent, and very large without being apocalyptic. Engineers are used to dealing with questions of scale and this book can go a long way toward putting matters into a fair perspective for a reasonably competent readership, as well as elucidating the spectrum of promising response strategies. I would be very interested in hearing from anyone who has any idea if, when, and how the level of competence exhibited in this book will enter the discourse of the general public on this matter, or how, in the larger sense, a distractible and information-overloaded democracy can deal with matters which are subtle without being (as some nay-sayers venture in the matter of global climate change) particularly intractable. Michael Tobis, Ph.D. (Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences)