5 comments about Nontechnical Guide to Petroleum Geology, Exploration, Drilling and Production (2nd Edition).

1. This is the best book available if you want to understand the petroleum industry without all of the techy details (or the engineering that comes with it). An excellent overview & reference.



2. Very well written and formatted for those of us with very little or no previous oil and gas related experience. Covers all the bases and allows the reader to see how prospects are identified and analyzed and the hydrocarbons recovered and marketed. Recommended for all those wanting to learn more about the industry.



3. I am a graduate geologist and I found this book ideal in my circumstances as an introduction before I got some petroleum work experience.It is very well written ,even a layperson could get a good appreciation for the wide encompassing subject matter.It is not aimed at specialists or those with a lot of experience in the petroleum geoscience.However, it is one of the best text books I have read.



4. I was looking for a book giving a comprehensive overview ofthe petroleum industry Upstream processes.
   
   I found it. This is a great book with a practical sense and the figures and tables needed to build Your own frame of information.
   
   If You need a practical understanding of the industry to build a business case, or figure out Oil Co needs. This is where to start



5. Well done Norman J Hyne, what an excellent edition. You explain how this complex industy works in very easy to understand chapters and supporting diagrams. Well worth the price.

5 comments about The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time.

1. And no to say that it's bad being a tree hugger - it's not, but this in an impractical book for everyday living. For every suggestion (there are hundreds) it tells you "if everyone did this in America it would save blah blah blah". Some of these blah blah's are eye opening, but many of them caused my eyes to roll.
   
   They suggest you buy shoes with recycled soles.....seriously. Where do you find shoes with recycled soles? Many many suggestions are repeated throughout the book. Just about every section recommends CFL's and to recycle anything recyclable, turn off lights and unplug items....over and over and over again.
   
   As a matter of fact, go ahead and read the last few sentences, and you've read the book. I recommend Save Money, Save Energy. Much better.



2. This book should be required reading for all Americans. In a practical non-preachy style, you'll be inspired to be greener! I was amazed at the simple things I can do to decrease my footprint, many without much of a sacrifice. The book is written in sections (such as beauty, home, shopping, travel, sports etc.)which provide simple steps to live more eco-friendly. Tons of interesting facts are presented. You'll be amazed at the types of things you shouldn't be using or doing. I already have my list of 5 things I can start doing today!



3. This book gives you "realistic" tips. Good guide to become a better planet friendly person.



4. This book is decent in the following ways:
   --It's mostly a tip book; there are some irrelevant "essays" or blurbs provided by some of today's popular celebrities (like Tyra Banks, Ellen Degeneres) but fortunately, you can skip them
   
   --For the most part, it's an optimistic book. It just offers ideas that make you more aware of the way you're living and ways you can change it. It means well enough
   
   --The Book is printed with 100% postconsumer recycled paper/fiber
   
   BUT
   
   This book is horrible in the following ways:
   
   --In terms of Eco-Living Guides, this book is hands down awful! It's insulting to a reader who really wants to change their way of living (they want you to put down $13 to tell you that when you aren't in the room to shut off your lights to save energy.... Really?!).
   
   --The book is 200 pages but more than a quarter of it is simply references for info like that above... honestly
   
   --This book could've been written in 3 words: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Instead this book beat those three magic words to death by nit picking every aspect of your life (ex. instead of just saying "buy recycled school supplies," each supply has its own tip, "buy recycled paper" "buy recycled binders")
   
   --The tips are regurgitated throughout, for instance the same tip to "reuse your paper clips" is found in the sections for both the office
   and school
   
   --While it means well with its tips, it could have been much more helpful. For instance, if they recommend us to buy recycled office supplies, it would've been nice to provide the reader for some places or websited to actually BUY recycled office supplies. Instead, they stayed generic and offer the reader nothing
   
   --Plus, it's so bad that it has to get some celebrity opinions so it could desperately draw an audience.
   
   So overall, this book is terrible. This book was written for people who want in on the "Green" trend and get that warm fuzzy feeling without it really changing their current lifestyle. I would not recommend this book to someone who really wants to make a difference in their life and take the "Green" trend seriously.



5. It wasn't as good as I thought it was going to be. 90% of the stuff in here was common sense or stuff our parents taught us years and years ago. I ended up passing it on to a friend who was talking about buying it herself. Thought I'd save her some cash and maybe save yet another book from going in the trash.

5 comments about The Necessary Revolution: How individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world..

1. I am a fan of the Society for Organizational Learning's approach to large organizational and social challenges. This book closes the loop on the learning's of Senge's entourage which span from The Fifth Discipline and the practical Field books to Presence. Now in The Necessary Revolution each author's unique experiences in teaching and guiding many fellow travelers along the road towards a more sustainable way of life are blended together in a coherent whole.
   
   This book captures the process of leading organizations on the journey towards sustainability without losing the necessary personal and spiritual touch that is so necessary in leading multi-dimensional sustainable changes within complex organizations. This is certainly a book to be used in business schools because while it teaches some administration of the sustainable organization, it also teaches the value of disruption and the disruptive innovation process, and how to guide and meld such strategies.
   
   I have been fortunate to have known personally, Brian, Sara, and Joe, and to have learned much as a result of their efforts through workshops, seminars and the Sustainable Enterprise Academy. I am very pleased to see so much of the essence of these efforts condensed in this volume. There are now many books on approaching sustainability through enterprise, organizations and society, but The Necessary Revolution enters new territories through the experience and rigor of the authors.



2. This is one of the most interesting and important contributions of 2008 to the vital area of sustainability thinking. MIT's Peter Senge is well known for deep analysis of organizational effectiveness (that can be challenging to read). He applies the same "systems thinking" found in his best-selling book, "The Fifth Discipline", to the multi-dimensional problem of unsustainable industrialization to reveal the real drivers and not merely the symptoms of the core problems. Yet in this fresh, face-paced book, Mr. Senge takes a more "story-teller" approach to illustrate how we as a society can accomplish much more in our efforts to find more sustainable practices working together than working in a wary isolation.
   
   He uses many examples of successful collaboration between industry, brands, NGO groups, government and individuals. This is the new charter for effectiveness. As Wired magazine rightly said this year: "Global warming is too important to leave to environmentalists alone to solve." Government and business are in the best position to lead large-scale sustainable change and must take more and more ownership.
   
   I help lead sustainability programs for a major athetic brand, and we would never dream of collaborating around performance technology innovations. Yet, increasingly, we and my peers at other brands throughout the industry have been actively collaborating around many sustainability initiatives - even making ideas and patented technologies that solely benefit the environment available to others. We work with NGO groups to better inform our strategies and they are always willing and helpful to collaborate (as some of them say, we would rather work in partnership than take you to court!). We are working to develop common mreasures and standards to drive supply chains toward more sustainable production and better equip the consumer for informed choices regarding environmental impact. Senge's book is all about such collaboration - in product companies, energy sector and the built environment.
   
   No longer perceived as a fad or gimick, sustainability and eco-thinking are now evolving to necessary(and perhaps even survivability) strategies to insure this generation's children will have a world worth inheriting and similar opportunities than us adults have had living quite well off the resouces of the planet. Peter Senge shows us how to get there by developing shared awareness of the problem and working effectively across boundaries of all kinds. A main audience he wrote this book for is the grass-roots visionaries who have "gotten this" long ago and who work quietly but surely as the dynamic change-agents for a more sustainable world. A intellectually savvy and notable contribution to the topic that reads remarkably well. 5 stars.



3. Senge's book correctly identifies the sustainability challenge, gives a bit of history about how we got where we are and then establishes a framework for companies, individuals, governments and others to follow in order to tackle the problem. He provides lots of examples of sucesses in the area of sustainability and gives a good amount of detail about specific initiatives that have yielded results. Well-written and provocative. I work in this area and he gave even me reason to rethink some of my ideas.



4. The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and organizations are working together to create a Sustainable World. (TNR)
   Value of TNR: The theme of TNR is that we must shift beyond being reactive in our solutions approach, merely seizing short term solutions, and move to deep thinking to really make a difference. I strongly agree. The book includes many stories of what organizations and individuals are doing to try to be more proactive. The "Take, Make, Waste" mode of the last 60 years is no longer viable and some folks are digging deeper in their thinking and getting beyond symptom solutions. It is the right message but with insufficient thinking on the part of the authors on what it would really take to accomplish that deep thinking. They fall into the same trap they are critiquing, working in a problem-solving mode with humans doing less harm and letting nature restore itself, but with just a more sophisticated version than they challenge.
   Shortfall: The authors point out that what got us into the mess we are in is working from a Cartesian view of reality that sees the world as things divided into parts and pieces that are not connected. As a result we have outsourced solutions by specialty, allow the problem creator to side step the deep dive to get to the underlying causes. However, TNR is working with an approach to Systems Thinking based on the Study of machines and computers that originated at MIT with Jay Forrester in the Engineering and Cybernetic Systems School in the 1950s. Forrester moved to the Sloan Management School and took his Systems Dynamic Theory with him. It is still a part of the Sloan School and has been adopted by the SOL Sustainability Consortium unrevised from its computer science basis and applied directly to human systems. It is true that Systems Thinking is needed to get us past the current crisis but one based in and developed from understanding artificial intelligence in computers and the working of machinery is just as limited as the element Cartesian model that positioned us for the current challenge. Even though the authors open with the Einstein quote, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we create them," they fail to see that that is the mind that created the form of system thinking is still the one they are using for the most part.
   One of the greatest shortfall of the book is the banalization of the term regenerative and equating it with renewable, as in renewable resources and restorative, as restoring a wetland to its original state--or letting nature do it. This comes from the way of thinking about Systems itself.
   The least encompassing type of Systems Thinking is what I call, Causal Systems Thinking or Cybernetic Systems Thinking because it is based in Cybernetic Studies and Science coming from Computer Science fields and Industrial Engineering applications to machinery based on non-living metaphors applied to Living Systems. Causal loops are an incomplete and often inaccurate way to describe human and social systems since they imply a single connecting or steam of causes back to an original cause. Even Forrester said that feedback loops do not apply to open systems, which Living Systems are because feedback loops are based on repetitive behavior and refer back to actions of the past and control those directly for the future. In open systems, the actions are independent of past action. (see Principles of Systems, Jay Forrester, 1979) www.wholebusinessblog.wordpress.com



5. At the end of this review following the links to other recommended books, I specify why this book receives four stars instead of five. Shortly I will load several images that will augment my written review, a couple of them recreated from this book, a couple my own original work.
   
   I found this book absorbing, and while I recognized many many areas where the authors could have identified and respected the work of others more explicitly, I also found this to be the single best book for a manager of any business, any non-profit, any educational institution, any citizen advocacy group, with respect to the changing paradigm of business from industrial era obsess on profit and waste wantonly, to the information era of integrated full life cycle with total transparency of all costs (social, environmental, and financial) and ZERO footprint on Earth and society. There is ample original work from the authors, and this book is priced just right as a vehicle for energizing groups of any kind.
   
   Following from my extensive notes:
   
   + A handful of top global businesses "get it" and have been pioneering footprint free zero waste business model: BP, GE, Coca-Cola, Dupont, even Nike.
   
   + Non-governmental organizations (NGO) know more about local needs and the emerging marketplace (four billion of the five billion poor, I am very disconcerted to see the business world "writing off" the one billion extreme poor) than any market "intelligence" firm.
   
   + With credit to Jared Diamond, I read for the first time about the unreal financial reality "bubble," and the "real real" world bubble that is catching up with it. See John Bogle's book below for a deeper explanation of how the financial mandarins have stolen one fifth of the value and misdirected the Main Street economy while doing so.
   
   + Although I have read Stewart Hart's work, this book helped me appreciate in detail his Sustainability Value Matrix.
   
   + Other "big ideas" by others that are integrated into this book include that of civil society stakeholders; ethical consumerism, stabilization wedges (Palala and Socolow),ladder of inference (an anthropological practice), peacekeeping circles, requisite organization, and law of limited competition (Daniel Quinn)
   
   PROBLEM STATEMENT:
   
   1. Industrial Waste (USA wastes 100 billion tons a year, 90% of inputs)
   
   2. Consumer/Commercial Waste & Toxicity (of 8B/year, 5B not absorbable)
   
   3. Non-Renewable Resources in Sharp Decline
   
   4. Renewable Resources down 30-70% and in some cases close to extinction tipping point (fresh water, topsoil, fisheries, forests)
   
   THREE GUIDING IDEAS:
   
   1. No viable path neglects future generations
   
   2. Institutions matter
   
   3. Real change must be grounded in new ways of thinking (see Durant below, capstone lessons from their ten volume history of civilization was that the only real revolution is in the mind of man, and that morality has a strategic value of incalculable proportions).
   
   THREE AREAS OF BUSINESS CONCERN:
   
   1. Energy & Transportation
   
   2. Food & Water
   
   3. Material Waste & Toxicity
   
   THREE PRE-REQUISITES FOR NEW THINKING:
   
   1. Seeing Systems Within Systems (Full Cycle Closed Earth)
   
   2. Collaborating Across Boundaries (No one has it all)
   
   3. Creating & adjusting instead of problem solving in isolation
   
   SIX BASIC IDEAS:
   
   1. Natural system encloses social and economic systems
   
   2. Industrial system must operate in that context
   
   3. Regenerable resources have harvest limits
   
   4. Non-renewable resources are finite.
   
   5. Waste is a cancer on the Earth
   
   6. Socio-cultural community is the vessel for change
   
   THREE SKILLS FOR CREATING THE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE:
   
   1. Convening diversity of viewpoints
   
   2. Listening to all, avoiding advocacy
   
   3. Nurturing relationships over time and above money
   
   EXPLICIT INCENTIVES FOR GOING GREEN:
   
   1. Save dollars internally
   
   2. Make dollars externally
   
   3. Provide customers with competitive value
   
   4. Sustainability as point of differentiation
   
   5. Shape the future of your industry, win market share
   
   6. Become a preferred supplier for giants like Home Depot
   
   7. Change image and brand for better (70%+ of market value)
   
   The book is full of examples of successful change implementation, and includes a number of "toolbox" pages that could be made into a protable booklet or distributed broadly across corporate networks.
   
   I was struck throughout the book with the value of this work in identifying specific personalities and specific companies who could be drawn into the broader holistic work of emerging meta-strategic networks such as Reuniting America, the Transpartisan Institute, and Earth Intelligence Network. Two women in particular jumped out as future global leaders on the order of Lee Kuan Yew and Nelson Mandela:
   
   1. Vivienne Cox of BP
   
   2. Lorraine Bolsinger of GE
   
   I put the book down deeply impressed with its concluding sections, and thinking to myself: China, CHINA, CHINA! That is the center of gravity for getting right on a massive scale in the near term.
   
   Other important books NOT mentioned by this book:
   The Story of Civilization by Will Durant with The Lessons of History (Complete in 10 Vols. plus The Lessons of History which was written by Durant to accompany the 10-volume set)
   Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry)
   The Knowledge Executive
   The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
   High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
   The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
   The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks
   One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
   The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
   Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
   
   I resolved to rate this book as a four for the following reasons, in relative order of annoyance:
   1) Crummy index for what could have been a brilliant REFERENCE book, not just an orientation book for leaders that do not read a lot. This index is SO BAD it fails to list all the individuals mentioned, and completely blows off numerous key phrases (e.g. sustainability wedges) that would be in any properly created professional index.
   2) No literature search and total isolation from the major literatures of Collective Intelligence, Wealth of Networks, Organizational Intelligence, Integral Consciousness, Closed Systems Engineering, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and so on.
   3) Understandable use of the iconic name of the lead author, but in all probability actually written by the other four authors.
   4) Really marginal reference section and no bibliography (even more valuable would have been an annotated bibliography).
   5) Absolutely clueless on the means of visualizing and using world-class visualization to create compelling multi-dimensional mental images (this is not to say I am any better, just that they missed a chance to be "the" reference work for the next seven years).
   
   Bottom line on the deficiency: I read very broadly, and am increasingly distressed at the continuing isolation of authors from one another's work. It's time every work of this importance do a proper job of connecting to other works.

1 comments about Microbiology: An Evolving Science.

1. I love this book! It has a nice full glossary and section summaries. It has chapter review questions but doesn't give the answers. It has though questions (critical thinking) that it DOES give the answer to. (Weird?) This book is very well written, very English (the language, not the nationality). My professor goes along with the book so that always makes you get more out of it.
   The topics sometimes seem kinda random, and the same small concepts are repeated several times in different chapters and never (so far) going into details. The website for the book has nice online diagnostic quizzes. It's definitely a book that if your instructor says buy it, you should read it, because you will get something out of it. There's lots of interesting pictures which make it fun to read too.

5 comments about Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.

1. This is a great book that makes us all more aware of the situation we find ourselves in presently aboard spaceship earth. We simply can not conduct business the way that we have in the past. The earth is not a business in liquidation. The green trends that are occuring now and that are gaining momentum are fascinating.
   This is a global book with a global focus, we are all in this together.
   How much time is needed? Who can know for sure but the sooner we all start, the better.



2. A practical comprehensive compendium of the types of practices we will need to nourish if we are to live in a Bright Green sustainable and just future. More a catalog than an essay, it is divided into sections such as Stuff, Shelter, Cities, Community, Business, Politics and Planet, giving examples of sustainable work being done in each area as well as references to relevant books and web sites. There is a strong emphasis on the potential for well-designed technologies to improve the lot of all human beings. The book is basically a collection of the types of things you will find at the [...] website.



3. A nonsensical belief that we can solve the environmental crisis by avoiding self change. Never in our history have their been a more deluded and narcissistic generation clambering to take the helm. We're in serious trouble.



4. This book is absolutely amazing and lifechanging because of all the important information that is in this book. You just have no idea how bad we treat the world and how close we are to destroying our lives all so we can have selfish comforts on a daily basis.



5. Although the book looks very good and most interesting, it did NOT come with the box cover, as advertised. False advertising - I would suggest not ordering it from Amazon.

5 comments about Pure Sea Glass: Discovering Nature's Vanishing Gems.

1. My wife and I collect sea glass daily on the Oregon coast. This book did give us a good explaination of what types and the possible origin of glass we've found. Lots of pictures to compare the various colors of sea glass which indicates rare to common. A good reference book for sea glass collectors.



2. Nice book with nice pictures. Haven't had time to actually sit and read thru it.



3. Everything you would ever need to know about seaglass is in this book! VERY interesting!!! I love it & could read my copy over & over!



4. I have recently became interested in sea glass after finding a few beautiful peices when I ordered this book. I was not dissappointed! This book is very informational and beautifully illustrated. I found a match for a peice I had found in the book, allowing me to date the peice.
   
   I love this book and will keep in on my coffee table along with my display of my precious finds! It's a joy just to flip through and just look at the pictures.



5. This is a lovely coffee table book that is amazingly beautiful as well as informative. I have recently started collecting beach glass and I learned so much about the various colors, how rare each is and where the glass might have come from. I highly recommend this book to any beach glass collector.

5 comments about Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.

1. I purchased this book as a gift for a fellow graduate student who is studying the relationship between vascular plant roots and fungi. He and our professor/advisor oohhed and aahhed over it. I should have gotten one for our advisor too!
   
   A quality book with great photos through-out and it is very readable! I have come to the conclusion that mycologists aren't pretentious wordy folks! They enjoy their work, enjoy spreading their knowledge and it is obvious in this book! I agree with the previous reviews - this book should be recommended, if not required reading for any botany or mycology course.



2. I didn't get to read all of this book because it was a gift for someone but what I did read was very good. It's very informative in all aspects of mushrooms. The book includes the science behind mushrooms, how they can be used for ecological benefits, and best of all how to grow and harvest them yourself. The index of mushrooms, their uses and other information was short but very good. I highly recommend this book and will probably get it for myself soon.



3. This book provides a wonderful look into the world of fungi and their properties. I bought the book after seeing the author in a video, and the book has fully lived up to my expectations.



4. This is an extremely easy read - with great examples on how mushrooms grow and how it can be commercialised. If you have an interest in this area, then this is the book to read. Would highly recommend it.



5. This is a book that should be on every gardener's bookshelf. You learn that there is far more to building soil than just adding compost. Inoculate the soil with mushrooms and you can harvest food while you improve your soil and everyone's environment. Get this book and don't just read it. Put it into practice and improve the world.

5 comments about Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition.

1. This book was an alarming, eye-opening account of how the United States is running out of it's own water resources that provide for many of desert urban areas. Why is it that we are settling in areas that are not natural for us as human beings to live in, and depleting our water resources and damaging natural beauty in order to live in seemingly uninhabital areas, such as Las Vegas, and Phoenix? This book looks to address this and much much more. A great read for anyone interested in enviromental politics and issues in the U.S..



2. Cadillac Desert is a plodding book that spends more time making sideways remarks about its characters than establishing it's own narrative. Plagued by numerous typographical errors, it reads in fits and starts. While its message of government excess and because-we-can justification for modifying the natural landscape is surely worthwhile, if repetitive, the fact of the matter is that two generations of farmers, ranchers and urbanites in the American West looked to the Bureau of Reclamation as the only organization suited to develop their water resources. The dated material is noticeable at times--who but a civil engineer now knows of the Teton Dam failure? why the concern over the Central Arizona Project that has operated for nearly two decades?--and the treatment of the material is done with an eye toward stirring the reader's emotions more than informing them. Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire deals with much the same material in a more thorough and even-handed, though academic, manner.



3. Essential reading for anyone living in the American West or living in the East and subsidizing water rates in the West.



4. This was a return engagement to "Cadillac Desert", as I had read the original in the 1980s, amazed at the time, considering it a premier example of thorough history and analysis in a subject about which few people knew much at all. What could have been a "dry" subject was actually quite gripping and informative, and fortunate to have many participants in key moments still available.
   
   In that sense the author was ahead of his time, documenting essential history that looks all the more important twenty years later. No doubt the book would still be fresh history to many, especially if supplemented by some other source on more current topics. I can only imagine what Mr. Reisner would think of the explosive growth of Las Vegas in the barren Nevada desert in recent years.
   
   I finally got to the revised edition and certainly feel the loss of Marc Reisner, who would have had plenty of material for another revision or two. The additional material is a plus, although it, too, has been around long enough for either edition to be a worthwhile reference.
   
   The growth of Los Angeles and the whole situation with the Owens Valley, San Fernando Valley, William Mulholland, the Chandlers, and so on, is exceptional, and can be read almost on its own. Perhaps there is a more definitive history, with more emphasis on some individuals or some other angle. Reisner packs a punch, laying it all out bluntly, including the fraud and corruption along with social and technical aspects.
   
   Another favorite was the early history of the unexplored West, such as John Wesley Powell's prescience and his journey down the virgin Colorado. How much the region has changed in such a short time, and how extensive were our errors.
   
   This is a first-rate history.



5. This was an outstanding book. Filled with a lot of information I had only partially known, and seldom understood. The story of thousands of dams built for no reason other then to keep two Federal agencies in business. Some success and some death causing failures. A must read for anyone west of the Mississippi with a interest in the historical infrastructure of the western states despite the massive mishandling of Federal funds to aid in ecological disaster. A true study in government math at alludes us all.

No comments about The Atlas of the Real World.

5 comments about The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too to do so.

1. There are such a lot of strong opinions about global warming. It is refreshing to get an alternate viewpoint - the author is an involved environmental advocate who is at the same time concerned about the science and objectivity. He does a good job of presenting credible dissenting views from the now popular storyline - where man being the main cause of global warming - is presented as a certainty, in spite of substantial evidence questioning this certainty. The scientists whose views are presented are leaders in their respective fields and acknowledged experts in various aspects of the global warming debate. Their basic appeal is for honesty and forthrightness in looking at the facts and the whole question of global warming, so that we can properly address the issues. No one benefits from either stridency or twisting scientific analysis to support a personal or political agenda - the very nature of the scientific effort is to seek to understand the processes, and to help assess what impacts may be. When analysis is twisted to present a skewed picture of what is taking place, it helps no one. Instead we should be attempting to assemble an accurate picture of what environmental forces are at work, and to determine both what the risks actually are, and what options we may have to address them. Much of current activism seems to be driven by the fear (of the not so distant future effects) of man-caused global warming. The feeling is that if we will only take immediate and strong action, we can prevent the worst from happening (sea levels rising, increasing disruptions of weather patterns, and continued poisoning of our natural resources). But what if the global warming that we are currently experiencing is just a natural phenomenon, and the linkage of CO2 accumulation with global warming is not true? If we knew that to be the case, how would that affect our current actions? The fact that our energy supplies are limited, and that we face an incredible growth of demand is a real challenge that we must address with vision and courage. The need to responsibly manage our global resources, including reducing pollution and creating a sustainable approach to all that we do is needed and commendable. It is really just in the area of the global warming debate where it is important for us to figure out whether we really have a problem, so that we can muster public opinion and resources behind a clear plan of action (if one is needed).
   The book is very readable and credible, and is well worth being read, no matter what side of the global warming debate you may be on. Highly recommended.
   
   The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too to do so



2. This book is written by a Canadian Environmental Activist who wanted to know why leading scientists kept denying man-made global warming so he interview a number of them for his column. In every case, they have good solid reasons why the IPCC ignores the lack of science that they address in the fields in which they are the very top experts in the world. For example, the "Hockey Stick" graph showing dramatic warming recently is based upon statistical formulas that do not stand up to analysis by a real statistics expert. They produce the same result 99% of the time with random data. Good, easy read and well documented.



3. L. Solomon's pleadings for a rational approach to global warming should really be a must for every citizen and, especially, for all teachers and their pupils. A well written, scientifically backed summary of the recent knowledge about climate change (if there is any...).



4. This book is excellent in shining the light of day onto the scam of claims that fossil fuel combustion is causing warming of the Earth. This scam was primarily perpetrated in this country by the Hollywood movie "An Inconvenient Truth", earning one of it's Producers, A. Gore, millions of dollars by his dealings in "carbon credits" through his brokerage firm. It reveals how if the US signs the Kyoto Treaty (setting worldwide allotments on carbon emissions) it could raise our taxes by 1000%. The many world reknown scientists (the "Deniers") interviewed for the book by its author, Lawrence Solomon, discuss their verified scientific data showing, among other things, that: carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion only accounts for less than 1% of Global Warming Greenhouse Gases . . . the oceans absorb and release most of the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere to maintain a ratio of 50 to 1 of carbon dioxide in the oceans to that in the atmosphere . . . the method used to determine the "movie" historical atmospheric carbon dioxide content was seriously flawed . . . historical records properly analyzed show rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide following rises in temperature . . . our present apparent warming cycle is quite natural and caused by an increased Sun energy output . . . and, warmer temperatures are much more beneficial to mankind than cooler temperatures, by decreasing mortality and increasing food production. These are only some of the conclusions presented in the book, which on the surface perhaps appears too complex and scientific for the non-technical reader, but through a clean narrative manner and a few simple, clear, tables and graphical presentations, it is quite a compelling book for most readers. For the technically oriented who are interested in exploring the facts and proofs of the books conclusions, Mr. Solomon presents an amazing 377 clarifying Endnotes, containing hundreds of sources for substansiating and explanatory data . . . as well as an Index of the Global Warming "Players".



5. Laurence Solomon tells the sober side of the story of the global warming challenge confronting humanity. Solomon has brought together ten "eminent" scientists who put the case for truthful debate on the issue, debunking statistics that have created much distorted information...BGP