Global Warming: The Last Chance for Change

"The last 50 years stick out like a sore thumb... The temperature's gone up and up and up. It bears the imprint of human activity."

--Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Princeton University

"It's not something we can adapt to...we can't let it go another 10 years like this."

--Dr. James Hansen, Director NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, member National Academy of Sciences

"The weight of evidence for climate change is very strong indeed, and it has gotten stronger over the years...The rate of warming is now greater than it has been for 10,000 years; that means the rate of climate change is greater than it has been for 10,000 years."

--Sir John Houghton, Professor in atmospheric physics, University of Oxford, recipient of Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal, Honorary Member American Meteorological Society

"This is the biggest challenge our civilization has ever had consciously to face. If this goes on, we will lose ice cover on our planet. The process will cause such rapid transformation we will have enormous trouble adapting."

--Sir David King, Professor of Physical Chemistry at Cambridge, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government

[All of above quotes from Paul Brown's Global Warming: The Last Chance for Change]

Sometimes when I set out to review a book, certain parts of the book inspire me to write before I am even ready to review it. I made many references to parts of what I was reading in John and Teresa Heinz Kerry's book, This Moment on Earth, before I reviewed it, for example.

Right now I am finishing up the latest book on Global Warming, titled...well, Global Warming: The Last Chance for Change, by Paul Brown, a long-time correspondent for The Guardian. I will review this book soon. It is excellent, far better than my initial expectations of it. Simply put, it is the most comprehensive and thorough discussion of the issue to date. A must read even for skeptics because if they can't address what is in this book then they have no right to be skeptics. But more on that in a later diary someday soon.

Right now I want to focus on a single chapter of this book: Chapter 13 discussing Nuclear Energy.

I have written about the issue of Nuke Enegery as it applies to Global Warming before. I have been swarmed by Nuke industry advocates, both reasonable and irrational, and discussed it at length. We had some Nuke Advocates of the more or less reasonable end on Culture Kitchen for awhile. But the arguements put forward by the nuke advocates alwasy struck me as too one-sided and too dismissive of any other opinion.