Customer Reviews:
 good order December 20, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is order took about 2 weeks to come, but it was expected, seeing that it was coming from NY to CA. The condition of the book was excellent, and I got a good price from it. Thanks!
 Good Introduction to Global Warming November 10, 2008
This book is a very approachable introduction to global warming. Basic science behind what's happening is explained well.
 What were they thinking? September 12, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an important book, but I'm about to give up half way through. The designer of this book has failed big time. There is way too much color with many pages having text overlaid on graphics. My eyes start asking for a time-out after just a few pages. The writing could use a better edit as well. In a book designed to make a complex subject easier to understand, there are still too many places that are hard to parse. Maybe the second edition will address these shortcomings.
If you only read one book on climate change, this is the one! July 28, 2008
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
If you're like me, you've longed for a user-friendly book to both clarify your own thoughts about global warming and to recommend to those acquaintances, friends, relatives, and colleagues who are either indifferent to climate change or think it's a bunch of tree-hugging hooey. Believe me, Dire Predictions is the book we've been waiting for. I rarely gush in the reviews I write. But I'm gushing in this one.
Authors Michael Mann and Lee Kump, the former a weather scientist and the latter a geoscientist, have put together a primer on global warming drawn from IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports that offers incredibly helpful illustrations and graphs, beautiful photographs, and informative, to the point text. The explanations are concise, typically a single topic to a page fold, and they focus on exactly the kinds of questions and issues that most of us have wondered about--for example, Is our atmosphere really warming?; How to build a climate model; Back to the future: Deep time holds clues to climate change; Fingerprints distinguish human and natural impacts on climage; Why is it called greenhouse effect? and Couldn't the increase in atmosphere CO2 be the result of natural cycles?
The book is divided into 5 parts:
1. Climate Change Basics
2. Projections of Future Climate Change
3. Impacts of Climate Change
4. Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change
5. Solving Global Warming
One of the best features of the Mann and Kump's approach is that they don't hesitate to respond directly to the "debunkers" of global warming that have become popular of late.
A wonderful book, exactly the sort of popular science approach that citizens, community activists, public policy makers, and presidential candidates need to get clear on the facts and implications of global warming. Highly recommended. Six stars.
great concept July 25, 2008
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
I love the concept behind this book: an "illustrated" guide instead of another long text of prose about global warming. It has tons of charts and graphs and colorful pictures, so you learn the field in a new way -- less abstractly, more intuitively. Slightly below a Scientific American-level. This book would be great for someone who wants to understand climate change, but doesn't have the background (or patience) to read a 300 page book on it. Plus it would be great for kids 7th grade and up.
I've read hundreds of books and articles and papers on climate change, and yet I still learn things from nearly every page in the book, no matter where in it I start.
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