Erik M. Conway

God knows I’ve written a few crass or aggressive reviews before but I’m not even going to review this one — I don’t know if I could stop myself from offending everyone, even those in agreement. The problem is not the book — it’s well done and probably every American should read it. It’s just that I spent 20 years of my life as a 3-pack per day smoker — of Camel unfiltered no less. I quit cold turkey in August 2006, but I’ve had a number of relatives die from the cancers they got from lifetimes of smoking and even though I was cognizant of a number of things in the book, reading this info, this tale laid out so well by the author comes close to sending me over the edge. I’m not going to say anymore except that I do recommend this book.… (mehr)

"The Collapse of Western Civilization" is probably more of a long magazine article rather than a short book, but in either case, is an interesting prediction made by the authors of what the future could look like if world governments fail to take steps to reduce continued carbon emissions into our atmosphere. The authors write as if they are historians from several hundred years in the future, looking back and trying to explain how past governments (e.g., our current leaders) could have ignored the known science of the day and failed to take the necessary steps to prevent global climate change. The premise of the book is that greenhouse gasses continued to accumulate in the atmosphere during our time, and that the deleterious effects of those emissions led to wide-spread flooding around the world due to sea level rise; water and food supply issues; and other predicted climate changes. It's an interesting twist to the climate change debate, e.g., not looking at what the future might be like from our perspective, but looking back at today's decisions made or not made from our great-great-great-grandchildren's perspective.… (mehr)

Depressing and, unfortunately, not especially surprising. Sad that these anti-scientists now dominate the government.

> German scientists had shown in the 1930s that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer, and the Nazi government had run major antismoking campaigns; Adolf Hitler forbade smoking in his presence. However, the German scientific work was tainted by its Nazi associations, and to some extent ignored, if not actually suppressed, after the war

> by the early 1960s the industry's own scientists had concluded not only that smoking caused cancer, but also that nicotine was addictive (a conclusion that mainstream scientists came to only in the 1980s, and the industry would continue to deny well into the 1990s).

> The Tobacco Industry was found guilty under the RICO statute in part because of what the Hill and Knowlton documents showed: that the tobacco industry knew the dangers of smoking as early as 1953 and conspired to suppress this knowledge. They conspired to fight the facts, and to merchandise doubt.

> "Doubt is our product," ran the infamous memo written by one tobacco industry executive in 1969, "since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public."

> Seitz had found other allies, and by the mid-1980s a new cause: rolling back Communism. He did this by joining forces with several fellow physicists—old cold warriors who shared his unalloyed anti-Communism—to support and defend Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. … As president of the National Academy of Sciences during the 1960s, Seitz had been disgusted by colleagues' antiwar activities, and had opposed the arms control efforts of the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations as well as Nixon's policy of détente—the U.S.-Soviet effort to move toward more peaceful relations … SDI was instantly controversial, creating a backlash among the very scientists Reagan would need to build it. While most physicists had long been accepting military R & D funds, they reacted differently to SDI, fomenting a coordinated effort to block the program. By May 1986, sixty-five hundred academic scientists had signed a pledge not to solicit or accept funds from the missile defense research program … Why did scientists react so strongly to SDI? One reason was that they had a charismatic spokesman in the person of Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan.

> "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions," but it came to be known as TTAPS for the last names of its authors: Richard Turco, O. Brian Toon, Thomas Ackerman, James Pollack, and Carl Sagan. … Their conclusion was qualitatively consistent with TTAPS: "for plausible scenarios, smoke generated by a nuclear war would lead to dramatic reductions in land surface temperature." But quantitatively it was less alarming: the model did not experience the 35°C drop that the TTAPS model had. Instead, it suggested drops of 10°C to 20°C—quite enough to cause crop failure in the growing season, but not really enough to be called "winter." … Sagan's behavior—publishing in Parade and Foreign Affairs before the peer-reviewed TTAPS paper had appeared in Science—was a violation of scientific norms. Moreover, the Parade article presented the TTAPS worst-case scenarios and omitted most of the caveats, so to some scientists it didn't appear as an honest effort in public education. Some saw it as outright propaganda

> In his most famous work, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman argued (as its title suggests) that capitalism and freedom go hand in hand—that there can be no freedom without capitalism and no capitalism without freedom. So defense of one was the defense of the other.… (mehr)