Three resources on climate change
I recently came across two excellent resources on climate change, and also list a third which I encountered a couple of years back.
- Sustainable Energy - without the hot air by David McKay. The following is quoted from the excellent ten-page synopsis. The entire book is available for free on the web
Where numbers are used, their meaning is often obfuscated by enormousness. Numbers are chosen to impress, to score points in arguments, rather than to inform. In contrast, my aim here is to present honest, factual numbers in such a way that the numbers are comprehensible, comparable, and memorable. The numbers are made accessible by expressing them all in everyday personal units. Energies are expressed as quantities per person in kilowatt-hours (kWh), the same units that appear on household energy bills; and powers are expressed in kilowatt-hours per day (kWh/d), per person. ... [F]or example, driving an average car 50 km per day uses 40 kWh per day.... [and] covering 10% of the country with wind farms would yield 20 kWh per day per person on average.
One reason for liking these personal units is that it makes it much easier to move from talking about the UK to talking about other countries or regions. For example, imagine we are discussing waste incineration and we learn that UK waste incineration delivers a power of 7 TWh per year and that Denmark’s waste incineration delivers 10 TWh per year. (1 TWh (one terawatt-hour) is equal to one billion kWh.) Does this help us say whether Denmark incinerates “more” waste than the UK? While the total power produced from waste in each country may be interesting, I think that what we usually want to know is the waste incineration per person. (For the record, that is: Denmark, 5 kWh/d per person; UK, 0.3 kWh/d per person. So Danes incinerate about 13 times as much waste as Brits.) By discussing everything per-person from the outset, we end up with a more transportable book, one that will hopefully be useful for sustainable energy discussions worldwide.
- Software Engineering for the Planet by Steve Easterbrook, a presentation at ICSE 2009: slides part 1, slides part 2, discussion. Challenges computer scientists to tackle the problems that will let them answer the question "Daddy, what did YOU do during the climate crisis?" Lists the unique resources we have to bring to bear on one of the key problems facing humanity.
- Heat by George Monbiot. Argues that we need to reduce carbon emissions by 90% by 2030, and lays out a plan to achieve this Herculean task. Attacks sacred cows on both sides of the arguments, both those with their eyes shut to the problem and those that think windmills on houses are the answer. Doesn't hesitate to point out radical solutions that could work (he envisions how we could replace most use of cars by a sensible network of trains and busses), or to reject solutions that can't work (after extensive consideration of the alternatives, he concludes with regret that the only way to reduce carbon from air travel is to reduce air travel).
And just to provide another (non warmer) perspective lets have a look at E pur si muovePost a Comment