Tag Archives: Books

Guide to the Sharks of the World

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I love field guides. One should own a lot of field guides, not just to things you might go out in the field to see and identified, but just to browse through.

David Ebert, Sarah Fowler and Marc Dando have produced A Pocket Guide to Sharks of the World It is put out by Princeton, which does excellent guides (this is part of their Pocket Guide series).

From the Princeton site, about the authors:

David A. Ebert is the program director for the Pacific Shark Research Center and a research faculty member at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. Sarah Fowler cofounded the UK Shark Trust and the European Elasmobranch Association. She has been a member of the IUCN Shark Specialist Group since 1992 and is currently vice-chair of international treaties. Marc Dando is a freelance artist specializing in marine ecology and wildlife.

Don’t go to sea without this book, just in case you come across a shark.

This is a standard Petrides/Peterson style guide, with plates showing various sharks, and associated ID text. The front matter includes guides to fins and teeth, some basic information on biology and reproduction, the usual overview of external anatomy so you know what the terms are (so you know what a caudal keel is, and such). There is an extensive guide to teeth. There is a species checklist, an excellent glossary, and a list of species. Here’s a PDF of the book’s Introduction.

There are 501 species of shark known today, and all of them are in the book.

Screen Shot 2015-07-01 at 6.29.10 PMOne of the coolest things about the book is how they show relative size. Sharks vary a great deal in size across the diverse species. To show the size of the sharks on a given page, the authors use an image of a human next to the shark.

There really aren’t any other field guides out there like this, as far as I know. In my experience, if you come across a shark in most waters, it is highly likely to be one of a small number of common species and you don’t really need a guide to determine what it is. You just need the old salt down on the pier to tell you. But beyond the first couple of common species, the next shark or two down the line in commonness may be any of a large number of sharks, and for that you need a guide.

Sadly, but out of necessity, the guide includes information on identifying sharks from the fragments that are cut off and sold by shark hunters and poachers.

Sharks are cool, and this is a cool book.

A new coffee table book with horses and men with beards.

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Unbranded is the story of four guys and a small herd of mustangs who traveled three thousand miles across the American west. From author Ben Masters web site:

Ben Masters is the “mastermind” of Unbranded. In 2010, he and two friends completed a 2,000-mile ride along the Continental Divide. They were broke at the time and adopted some $125 mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management to supplement their string of quarter horses. They were surprised to find the mustangs outperformed the domestic horses. Intrigued, Masters looked into the wild horse controversy and found a sad and complex situation: 50,000 unwanted wild horses and burros living in government-leased pens and pastures and in need of permanent homes. He decided to do something about it. The Unbranded idea was born.

Masters recruited riders Jonny Fitzsimons, Thomas Glover, and Ben Thamer to join him on his quest and brought Director Phillip Baribeau on board to guide the film’s production. Masters then inspired and persuaded organizations and individuals from around the world to join the Unbranded mission, which resulted in a successful Kickstarter campaign and crucial funding for the project. During the ride, Masters was charged with the mapping and logistics for sixteen horses, four Aggies, and three alternating cameramen traveling through unpredictable terrain with changing landowners, agencies, and restrictions.

A native Texan, Masters graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in wildlife biology. During college, he attended classes in the spring, led horseback rides in Yellowstone during the summer, guided Wyoming elk hunts in the fall, and managed the Jacalon Ranch in South Texas over the winter. Masters, who is CEO of Fin & Fur Films, LLC, is an accomplished photographer, an experienced horse trainer and packer, a dedicated conservationist, and main author of the book Unbranded.

If you are into horses, or the American west, it is a great story. Even better, if you know someone who is, this is a great gift book because it is a well produced, coffee-table class book.

Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, Must Read Book

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Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming by Michael Mann and Lee Kump is everyperson’s guide to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The IPCC issues a periodic set of reports on the state of global climate change, and has been doing so for almost two decades. It is a massive undertaking and few have the time or training to read though and absorb it, yet it is very important that every citizen understands the reports’ implications. Why? Because human caused climate change has emerged as the number one existential issue of the day, and individuals, corporations, and governments must act to implement sensible and workable changes in behavior and policy or there will be dire consequences.

Dire Predictions is a DK Publishing product, which means it is very visual, succinct, and as is the case with all the DK products I’ve seen, well done. This is the second edition of the book, updated to reflect the most recent IPCC findings. The book gives a basic background on climate change, describes scientific projections and how they are developed, discuses impacts of climate change, and outlines vulnerability and modes of adaptation to change. The book finishes with a panoply of suggestions for solving the climate change crisis. Since Dire Predictions reflects the IPCC reports, it can be used as a primer in understanding the much more extensive and intensive original document, but it can also be used entirely on its own. I would recommend Dire Predictions for use in any of a wide range of classroom settings. It could be a primary text in middle school or high school Earth Systems classes, or a supplementary text in intro college courses. Anyone who is engaged in the climate change conversation and wants to be well informed simply needs to get this book, read it, and have it handy as a reference.

See: An interview with Michael Mann by yours truly

Lee Kump is a professor in Geosciences at Penn State, and author of a major textbook “The Earth System.” Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Director of the Earth System Science Centre at Penn State, and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (as well as countless scientific publications). Mann has been on top of the climate change issue for years. His work in the late 1980s, with colleagues, produced the famous “Hockey Stick” graph which had two major impacts. First, it made the link between the recent century or so of direct observation of Earth’s surface temperatures (with thermometers and/or satellites) and the “paleo” record made up of proxyindicators of temperature, an essential step in placing modern climate change in long term perspective. Second, using this connection, Mann and colleagues showed that recent global warming, known to be primarily caused by human released greenhouse gas pollution, was already extreme and likely to get more extreme. Since then, Mann has been a key scientist involved with the IPCC, and has carried out many important research projects.

See: New Research on Tree Rings as Indicators of Past Climate

I asked Dr. Mann to address a handful of questions I had about Dire Predictions.

Question: Some might think of the title of the book as a bit extreme, even “alarmist,” to reference a term we often see used by climate science deniers. I assume you chose it carefully. Why “Dire Predictions: [subtitle]” instead of “Understanding Climate Change: [subtitle]”?

Answer: This was a mutual decision between the authors (Lee Kump and myself) and the publisher. The publisher felt this title both communicates the nature of the content of the book and the larger message of urgency; The predictions really are “dire” for the worst case scenarios, i.e. if we fail to act on climate change.

Question: What are the biggest changes, or perhaps most interesting changes, between the first and second edition, such as new research? Did any of the initial projections get less dire? More dire?

Answer: The main difference is that the book reflects the latest science as reported in the most recent (5th) IPCC assessment report. Some spreads remained unchanged, i.e. we felt there were no significant developments in the science since the last report (and last book). But in other cases, there were some substantial developments, i.e. we felt compelled to talk about the “Faux Pause” since it has gotten so much attention, and the issue of equilibrium climate sensitivity is discussed in more depth. The concept of the “Anthropocene” is dealt with more explicitly. And the issue of recent cold eastern U.S. winters and what it really means, and the unprecedented current drought in California are discussed.

Question: It seems that for decades the climate science has been settled sufficiently to realize that release of fossil Carbon will have serious consequences. Yet policy and technology changes to address this have been slow. Is this simply because such things take a long time, or have the efforts of science deniers been successful in slowing down action? How much better (or less dire) would things be in, say, 2050 had people, corporations, and governments accepted climate change as a serious matter 20 years ago? In other words, how much damage has science denialism done?

Answer: Oh, that’s a fundamentally important point. There is a huge “procrastination penalty” in not acting on the problem, and we’ve presumably committed to billions if not trillions of economic losses by not having acted yet. But there is still time to avert the worst and most costly damages, so there is an urgency of action unlike there has ever been before. This is something we tackle head on in the book.

See: Michael Mann Answers Questions From Dangerous Children About Ian Somerhalder

Question: Since you finished working on the second edition, are there any new research findings you wish you could somehow add to the book? Or, any changes in what is emphasized?

Indeed. As you know, Stefan Rahmstorf, I and others recently published an article in Nature Climate Change demonstrating that the AMOC (North Atlantic ocean circulation, the so-called “conveyor belt”) may be weakening even faster than the IPCC models indicate. Yet, we have downplayed that topic (though it is mentioned in a brand new spread on “Tipping Points”) because the consensus has leaned toward this being one of the less likely tipping points to occur in the decades ahead. This is a reminder that science is often fast-moving, and in this case, had we waited a year to publish the 2nd edition of DP, we might have chosen to actually give the AMOC collapse issue even more attention!

See: A list of climate change books

Question: I’m wondering if the projections for sea level rise in Dire Predictions are conservative with respect to more recent research. Also, there seems to be a more clear and explicit link between climate change an ware or social unrest. Would these issues also have more attention if you had another shot at the book?

Answer: We do discuss the sea level rise and the fact that iPCC projections here (and for many other variables) have been historically too conservative. There is some discussion now about the role of water resources in national security and conflict, and the huge advances that are taking place in renewable energy (that is something that has changed dramatically since the first edition—and a reminder of the reasons there are for cautious optimism).

Also of interest:

Climatology Versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics

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Dana Nuccitelli is a key communicator in the climate change conversation. He is co-writer with John Abraham at the Climate Consensus – the 97% blog at the Guardian, and has contributed hundreds of entries to John Cook’s famous site SkepticalScience.com. He has measurably helped people to understand climate change science and the nuances of the false debate based over climate manufactured by science deniers.

And, he’s written a book!

Graphic from Cook, Nuccitelli, Et Al 2013 paper quantifying the consensus on climate change. This figure also appears in "Climatology and Pseudoscience"
Graphic from Cook, Nuccitelli, Et Al 2013 paper quantifying the consensus on climate change. This figure also appears in “Climatology and Pseudoscience”
Climatology Versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics fills a wide open niche in the climate science discussion. Dana powers through the literature on climate science, identifying and describing instances of the predictions, projections, or assertions made by climate science and compares these with assertions made by climate science contrarians, also known as deniers. (Though the distinction between denier and non-denier emerged later in the full time frame addressed in the book.) Simply put, Dana compares the two at several points to see which is correct: the projection that human generated greenhouse gas pollution warms the Earth and changes the climate, or the projection that it does not.

It turns out it does! But you knew that. But what you might not have realized is the overall time frame of how this situation has developed. Dana skillfully documents the deeply disturbing fact that the issue of global warming (and related things) has been settled for a very long time. Were it not for mainly fossil fuel industry funded anti-science activists, we would not be having this discussion today, and Dana would not have had to write his book. Rather, science would be focused on figuring out the remaining and important details of how the Earth’s climate system responds to human pollution as well as natural changes, and policy makers would be busy working out how to keep the Carbon in the ground. We probably would have had a price on Carbon years ago, and we’d probably be running our civilizations off of a very high and ever increasing percentage of clean (non fossil carbon) energy. But no, those denialists had to ruin it for everyone with their fake skepticism.

I asked Dana Nuccitelli, “What surprised you most while researching and writing this book?” and he told me,

I was surprised at how accurate mainstream climate scientists’ predictions about global warming have been, even using the earliest global climate models as early as 43 years ago. The earliest model predictions were based mainly on the warming expected from the increasing greenhouse effect, so it goes to show what a dominant factor carbon pollution has played on global temperature changes over the past half century.

Climatology Versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics is engagingly written, clear, accurate, non-technical but not watered down. If you know the stuff in this book you can be more confident than ever having those conversations with with your friends Denialist Dan and Warmest Willie. In fact, I would recommend Climatology Versus Pseudoscience along side Michael Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines for a comprehensive treatment of the history of both denialism and the science itself.

I asked Dana who he had in mind as the most likely audience for this book. I’m sure it is for general readership, but I also felt it could be used in classes.

I wrote the book with the general public as my intended audience. I wanted to make explanations about some basic climate science concepts accessible to everyone. My publisher told me that they anticipate that universities and libraries will be the main purchasers of the book though, so they may have had class use in mind more than I did!

Dana covers the early days of climate science, discusses the “Astounding Accuracy of Early Climate Models (Chapter 3), discusses the development of the scientific consensus on climate change, and provides an excellent overview of the current situation with greenhouse gas pollution caused climate change.

Over the last year or so, it seems that the climate conversation is starting to shift. Major media outlets are changing their approach, not following the dictum of false balance. Climate change is starting to become a bigger factor in elections, in a good way. The President of the United States has openly called on Americans to reject science denialism. I asked Dana where he thought the climate change conversation might be going over the next couple of years, and if we might see addressing climate change as more routine rather than highly controversial in the future.

I think much of the media is starting to shift towards more accurate, responsible, and truly balanced coverage on climate change. The Washington Post has been doing a great job since they hired Chris Mooney. The Guardian’s climate coverage is excellent. TV media coverage has been improving, and some great shows like Years of Living Dangerously and Cosmos have tackled climate change.

I think journalists and producers are starting to understand the difference between false balance and actual balance in climate reporting, and that media shift will be critically important in accurately informing the public on this critical issue. Most people vastly underestimate the level of scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, and I think that can mostly be blamed on media false balance. If you regularly see one-on-one debates, it’s natural to assume the experts are divided and debating the issue at hand.

With human-caused global warming, that’s obviously no longer true, but that perceived debate explains why people still don’t view climate change as a top priority. That needs to change, but that won’t happen until we have truly balanced media coverage accurately informing the public. That was one of my key motivations in writing this book – to hold the climate contrarians accountable for their bad science and failed predictions, because so far the media has failed to do that.

Dana’s final chapter talks about the future, about what can and should happen. He notes that we have the technology in hand to solve the climate crisis, and that we are starting to apply it.

I strongly recommend this book for the general reader, but I would also suggest it for use in certain classes, either in high school or college. If you are a teacher and want to thoroughly cover the “Debate” over climate science, get this book.

Published by Praeger; 214 pages; copious notes; index; cool graphic.

And now, for a little video fun related to Dana’s book, climate science, and the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas pollution and its effects:

Dana on Typhoon Haiyan and Climate Change:

The Climate Consensus Project (John Cook, Dana “Nutelli” Nuccitelli, and others):

A typical climate science denier, John Spencer, talking about the Consensus Project. on “Andrew Neil vs Dana Nuccitelli”

What climate scientists and communicators do when they are not being challenged by climate contrarians:

Dana’s Ice environmentally thoughtful Ice Bucket Challenge:

Steampunk LEGO

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You know Guy Himber’s work. He worked on special effects for Aien 3, Underworld, Independence Day, Edward Scissorhands, I, Robot, lots of other productions. And now, he is playing around with LEGO.

Steampunk Lego by Guy Himber is subtitled “The illustrated researches of various fantastical devices by Dr. Herbert Jabson, with epistles to the Crown, Her Majesty Queen Victoria; A travelogue in 11 chapters.” The book itself is all steampunky, in fact heavily steampunky, with brown colors, gears and wheels as background images, and victorian techno-objects decorating a faux photographic album motif. Meaning, Himber did not really write a travelogue in 11 chapters because, I assume, a true Victorian Travelogue would be mind numbingly boring. Everything is taped, glued, or in some cases, riveted onto the pages (no actual rivets were used in making this book).

Guy_Himber_Author_of_Steampunk_LegoIt may not be a Travelogue but it is very Travelish.

By my estimation about half the book involves depictions of things that travel. Lots of trains, boats, some bikes, Zeppelins, other lighter than air craft, other things that fly, and more. There are numerous robots, and a variety of other things. There is even a LEGO moon. All the contrivances are LEGO constructed and then photographed usually but not always using a victorian looking technology.

There is some background on what Steampunk is, which may be necessary for the LEGO-crazed who don’t happen to now much about this genre. Then there is background on the key players in the story, Sir Herbert Jobson and Lt. Penfold.

Then it is trains, monowheels, horseless carriages, automatons, weapons, a “cabinet of Curiosities”, boats, things that fly, clockwork animals, and floating islands. Then there is Space, the final frontier. I mean chapter. The final chapter.

The book is so visual, I think the best way to indicate its qualities is to show a number of spreads from within. With no particular introduction, these (click to see a larger version of the image):

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steampunk_004-005_web

This is a great coffee table present for the holidays. It is not a huge coffee table format, more like 10.5 by 8.5 inches, but somehow it looks bigger.

Pterosaurs by Mark Witton

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Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy by Mark P. Witton is a coffee-table size book rich in detail and lavishly illustrated. Witton is a pterosaur expert at the School of Earh and Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth. He is famous for his illustrations and his work in popular media such as the film “Walking With Dinosaurs 3D.”

The first pterosaur fossil was found in the late 18th century in the Jurassic Solnhofen Limestones, in Germany, the same excellent preservational environment that would later yield Archaeopteryx. They person who first studied it thought the elongated finger bones that we now know supported a wing served as a flipper in an amphibious creature. Not long after, the famous paleontologist George Cuvier recognized the winged nature of the beast. Witton notes that at the time, and through a good part of the 19th century, it was possible to believe that many of the odd fossils being unearthed were of species that still existed but were unknown to science. This is because most of the fossils were aquatic, and who knew what mysterious forms lurked beneath the sea? But a very large flying thing like this first pterosaur was very unlikely to still exist, unseen by European and American investigators. It had to be something major that was truly extinct. So in a way the history of extinction (the study of it, that is) was significantly shaped by this find. By the early 20th century there had been enough publication and study of pterosaurs to give them a place in paleontology, but not a lot else happened until the 1970s, when a combination of factors, including advanced technology that allowed more detailed and sophisticated study of fossils, led to much more intensive study of pterosaur anatomy and behavior.

Pterosaurs are part of the large taxonomic group that includes the lizards, dinosaurs, and birds, but they branched off within that group prior to the rise of the latter two. So, they are not dinosaurs, but cousins of dinosaurs. You can call them flying lizards, but not flying dinosaurs.

Witton explores this interesting history in some detail, and then proceeds to explore various aspects of pterosaur biology, starting with the skeleton, the soft parts (of which there is some direct but mostly indirect evidence), their flight, how they got around on the ground, and their reproductive biology. These explorations into pterosaurs in general is followed by several chapters devoted to the various groups, with a treatment of the evidence for each group, reconstructions of anatomy, locomotion in the air and on the ground, and ecology.

The resemblance of this layout to a detailed field guide for birds (or some other group) is enhanced by the use of color-coded bleeds at the top of each page, separating the book’s major sections or groups of chapters. The book ends with a consideration of the origins and endings of the “Pterosaur Empire.” It turns out that we don’t actually know why they went extinct. They lasted to the end of the Cretaceous, so going extinct along with their dinosaur cousins is a reasonable hypothesis, but they had already become somewhat rare by that time.

Pterosaurs are cool. Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy is a cool book.

Of related interest:

  • LOL Pterosaurs ….
  • Reconsidering the Reconstruction of the Pterosaur
  • Flying Dinosaurs: A New Book on the Dinosaur Bird Link
  • Giant Semiaquatic Predatory Dinosaur
  • Titanic Fearless Dinosaur Unearthed
  • Honey, I Shrunk The Dinosaurs …

    • The Age of Radiance

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    The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson (author of Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon) is a well done history of the atomic age. If you are a bit squeamish (justifiably I’m sure) about the nuclear industry or nuclear stuff generally you’ll find Nelson’s dismissal of your concerns as the product of a public relations fail on the part of the nuclear industry to be patronizing and annoying, but there isn’t too much of that in the book, and he’s partly right; most fears people have about nuclear energy are not especially accurate, but then again, that applies to all fears all the time, it seems. Nuclear power does not have as much of a power to make people stupid as nuclear power advocates suggest. But I digress…

    …. this is a biography of an important age in our history, one that we are currently leaving but will still be with us for hundreds of thousands of years, seeping into the groundwater. It is a fascinating story. I mean, seriously, the whole idea of nuclear physics is fascinating. Everything we knew about everything prior to the discoveries related to the cracking of the atom have two important characteristics: 1) almost off of that applies perfectly to the world around us (basic chemistry and Newtonian physics) and 2) it is all wrong. The opening days of the nuclear age involved that remarkable discovery. There was research, radiation, x-rays, then bombs and power generation. The cold war, terrorism, accidents. Nelson’s book is, really, just full of interesting stories.

    That Facebook Book Meme Thing

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    My friend Iain Davidson tagged me with the facebook novel meme. Here are the rules: Oh, hell, never mind the rules. I wanted to provide links to the books so I decided to do this as a blog post which I’ll paste on my facebook page (and of course tag some unlucky facebook friend).

    Here it is. I broke some rules. So what?

    Moment in the Sun: Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment by Dr. Robert Reinow was my Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. As a child I watched Reinow’s Sunrise Semester course on TV a couple of times. He would give a lecture on some manner or other by which humans were ruining the environment. Then he and his wife would put on a skit demonstrating it satirically. I especially remember the Reinow family sitting around to eat a nice dinner, and Mrs. Reinow sneaking over to the stove, opening the top of the pot in which the stew cooked, and dumping in copious quantities of DDT. “This is what we are doing to ourselves!” One day I started a project. I had just started driving and I wanted to visit every public road between Rout 9W and the Hudson River from Albany south at least a couple of counties distance. Early on during that project I came across Holly Hock Hollow Road. It sounded familiar. I drove up the road, and along it were various signs made to look like they were written by elves or gnomes, about this and that aspect of nature or the environment. Finally I came to an unoccupied (at the moment, but lived in) cottage and small complex of outbuildings. I had come to the Reinow estate. I went back a couple of times later but never managed to run into them. The book, which is the point of this paragraph, was prescient. It predicted pretty much everything that happened over the 20 years or so after it was written, from acid rain to DDT. The book made me an angry supporter of the environment, like Reinow was.

    I had messed around with the Sherlock Holmes Canon here and there for a long time then one day decided to read them all cover to cover. Then I did it again. Twice. I don’t know why, I just like it.

    Karl Hiassen wrote Tourist Season and then he wrote a bunch of other books, fiction, not children’s fiction, with a guy named Skink in them. I use those attributes to define the “Skink Canon” though in truth Skink himself is a relatively minor character in some of the books, and is never the main character. But he is in all of the books. The protagonist and antagonist in his novels shift though they are often similar to each other while Skink stays in place. In the swamps. Where he lives. I guess I like the Skink canon because if I lived in Florida I’d probably be Skink by now.

    Everybody seems to either love or hate Anne Rice, and when they do, it is all about the vampires. The vampires are nice, and I would certainly included those stories on a longer list of books, but less appreciated but in my view better is the series related to the Mayfare Witches: The Witching Hour, Lasher, and Taltos. Creepy weird good stories. Take notes, you’ll need them. Maybe a nice genealogy program will help.

    Rita Mae Brown wrote a number of novels exploring both related and unrelated themes in the same setting (though sometimes varying the century). This includes a long series co-authored with her cat. Rubyfruit Jungle is her famous, break-through, prize winning work. Amid this larger set of works is a trilogy, if memory serves correctly but I may be missing a piece (and they were written out of order but I’m giving you the historical order of the story here) that I take to represent her larger work. They are: Six of One, Loose Lips, and Bingo.

    Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers is an historical novel set during World War II following several different individuals of varying degrees (including zero) of connection to each other.

    I read Lord of the Rings when I was too young to totally get it but I enjoyed it. (It was about the second or third “adult” thing I read). Then I read it again when I was older and then one more time. Then, when I as in the Congo with a really bad case of Malaria I read a good part of it again and the story entered my delusional state, which was … interesting. I survived both. I’ll include Hobbit in with the trilogy because it fits.

    About the same time I was reading Lord of the Rings, I read The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science (in my case, two paper back volumes, one on physical science, the other biology). It is how I got introduced to science, sort of (I was actually introduced earlier but this was my first systematic learning of science, insofar as reading a book serves in this way). The science I was reading was a bit out of date but to a kid one digit in age that hardly mattered. Black holes were a conjecture, the big bang as I recall somewhat more accepted. Many particles had not been “found” but that search was very much underway. The biology section sticks with me less probably because I’ve gone ahead and unlearned all of the 1960s biology, since I’m kind of a biologist.

    When people ask me what novel to read, I often say “Hey, did you read The Egyptian by Mika Waltari yet? No? Read it!

    If you haven’t gotten around to Mastering Regular Expressions yet than you are missing out.

    I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the seventh grade, and it was quite life changing.

    I read Deschooling Society (70 Edition) in the ninth grade. It was quite revealing.

    I dropped out of school in the 10th grade. But that’s another story and there is no book.

    One day my sister said, “You’re kind of a freak, here, read this,” and handed me Welcome to the Monkey House. It was my first adult fiction. I didn’t find it freaky. That must prove I was a freak. Soon after I read Fahrenheit 451, then everything by Bradbury and Vonnegut (available at the time) along with, as mentioned Lord of the Rings. So that is how I got my start on literature.

    A Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World: The Voyage of the Beagle is the most revealing of Darwin, within a reasonable volume of words. I don’t know if it changed me but it has stuck with me and I refer to it often.

    Although A Perfect Spy might be a perfect Le Carré book, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone who hadn’t already read the Smiley canon. And, really George Smiley is where it is at: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality,The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Honorable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People, and so on (there are about three others).

    Sungudogo, the story of a pair of adventurers traveling across the Congo in search of an elusive primate that may or may not exist, reminds me of a lot of things I’ve done myself. Brilliant novel.

    Ten Thousand Birds

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    There are over 10,000 species of bird on the Earth today. There is one blog called “10,000 Birds” for which I write a monthly article, in case you did not know. But this post is about Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin, a book by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Monegomerie.

    Birds and various studies of birds are central to evolutionary theory and the development of all of the surrounding biology and science. Here’s a short list of key roles birds have played in evolutionary biology:

    <li>Darwin's study of pigeon breeding was central to <a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/41349/biblio/9780674637528?p_ti' title='More info about this book at powells.com' rel='powells-9780674637528'>On the Origin of Species</a> and later works. </li>

<li>The Galapagos <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/02/14/charles-darwin-finches/">finches</a> and other birds, observed by Darwin during <a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/41349/biblio/9781626365605?p_ti' title='More info about this book at powells.com' rel='powells-9781626365605'>The Voyage of the Beagle</a> were also key in the development of his work.</li>

<li>Darwin's work involved a great deal of other birds, such as <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/02/13/darwin-and-the-voyage-10-rheas-1/">the Rhea</a> and helped shape his thinking about species.</li>

<li>Skipping past many examples, and far ahead in time, The Sibley–Ahlquist taxonomy was the first major application of DNA to develop phylogeny. </li>

<li>As described in <a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/41349/biblio/9780679733379?p_ti' title='More info about this book at powells.com' rel='powells-9780679733379'>The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time</a>, the Grants' study of finches in the Galapagos advanced evolutionary theory with detailed tests of Darwin's models, and influenced <a href="http://gregladen.com/wordpress/wp-content/pdf/Laden_Wrangham_Roots.pdf">one of the most important works on the origin of humans</a>. </li>

<li>Birds have often been used as examples in teaching evolution.  Have a look at this example: <a href="http://10000birds.com/a_new_case_study_of_natural_selection_in_birds.htm">It May Be Hard To Swallow, But Bumpus Could Get Bumped To The Back Burner</a> </li>

    Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin is an absolutely spectacular book. It is big and heavy and over 500 pages long. It is dark green like all great scholarly books. Despite it’s great lenght it has only 11 chapters, so you know the material is treated in depth. It has dozens and dozens of pages of notes and references. It has an appendix with a list of 500 ornithologists. It has a separate appendix with a list of ornithologies.

    That’s all nice but the meat of the book is in those long intense chapters. These chapters provide a very thorough, detailed, and fascinating history of ornithology, often focusing on the ornithologists, their quirks, their visions, the contexts in which they worked, and their findings. So, yes, this is a history of the science. The story starts when birds first flew into the field of evolutionary biology, or perhaps, were captured by it, and traces the history of biology from a birds eye’s point of view, including the development of the modern synthesis, and on to the behavioral revolution of Lack, the conceptual revolution of Tinbergen, and the ecological reframing of MacArthur.

    This could serve as a very readable core of a college elective in the history of science, though it is certainly not a textbook. Richly illustrated, well written, engaging.

    Tim Birkhead is a professor of zoology at Sheffield, and has done major bird research. He wrote The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology and Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird. Jo Wimpenny is a bird researcher at Sheffield. Bob Montgomerie is professor of biology at Queen’s University in Ontario, and studies the evolution of plumage and bird sex.

    Rare Birds of North America

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    Rare Birds of North America is the only extensive treatment I’ve see of the so called “vagrant birds” in the US and Canada. Most, or at least many, traditional bird books have a section in the back for rare birds, occasionals or accidentals, which one might see now and then. But when you think about it, how can five or even a dozen species in a bird book really do justice to the problem of spotting birds that are normally not supposed to be spotted?

    I’m reminded of one South African bird guide that has a half dozen penguin species listed in it. There is only one species of penguin in South Africa but a handful of others have shown up, almost always as a corpse floating around with other junk on the beach somewhere. I suppose when we’re talking penguins, that counts.

    Anyway, Rare Birds of North America by Steve Howell, Ian Lewington and Will Russell includes 262 species illustrated across 275 plates, from the Old World, the New World Tropics, and the planet’s oceans. The first 44 pages or so are about rare birds, and the rest of the book is a morphologically-grouped compendium of the species. The species discussion run from page to page (unlike a typical modern guide). They include common name, binomial, basic size stats, then info on taxonomy, rarity, normal distribution, and as appropriate, subspecies Most of the plates have multiple illustrations showing various angles and flight vs. non-flight, sex-specirc, and other views. The illustrations are drawings and as far as I can tell are good quality. But since you never see these birds who the heck knows!?!?

    An appendix includes brand new rare species not covered in the book. A second appendix includes species that may or may not have occurred. A third appendix lists the “birds new to North America” by year. This appendix and various data presented at the beginning of the book are analyzed in the work, but seem ripe for further Science by Spreadsheet!

    This is a Hefty, thick-leaved, well made book (I reviewed the hardcover). Not a field guide but not a big coffee table book either. More like the bird-book-shelf and truck of the car style book.

    Steve N. G. Howell is research associate at PRBO Conservation Science and is affiliated with WINGS, an international bird tour company. Hew wrote Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America. Ian Lewington a bird illustrator famous for the high quality of his work. Will Russell is cofounder and managing director of WINGS.

    Penguins: The Ultimate Guide

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    There is a new book out on Penguins: Penguins: The Ultimate Guide written and edited by Tui De Roy, Mark Jones, and Julie Cornthwaite.

    It is a beautiful coffee table style book full of information. All of the world’s species are covered (amazingly there are only 18 of them) and there are more than 400 excellent photos. The book covers penguin science (science about them, not by them). There is also quite a bit about their conservation.

    The layout of the book is interesting. The last section of the book, by Julie Cornthwaite includes portraits of each species, and a compendium of interesting facts such as which is the fastest penguin, strange things about their bills, their odd moulting behavior, interesting color variants, how they “fly”, interesting mating facts, and what threatens them. Then there is a table organized taxonomically giving their status, population estimates, ranges, and main threats. Following this is a two page bird-guide type spread on each species, with a range map, photos, descriptions, information about their voice, breeding behavior, feeding behavior, etc. That is what you would expect in a book about penguins.

    But the first, and largest, part(s) of the book provides its uniqueness. The first section, by Dui De Roy, covers penguins generally, or specific exemplar species or groups of species, to provide an overview of what penguin-ness is all about. The second section, edited by Mark Jones, consists of 17 essays by various experts on specific topics, such as how penguins store food, how they are tracked at sea, and penguin-human interaction. I would like to have seen more about penguin evolution (which is interesting) but the sparsity of coverage of that topic does not detract from the book’s overall quality.

    If you are into birds, you probably don’t have a penguin book, so this will fill the bill. As it were. This is also one of those books that totally qualifies as a great present to give someone you know who has an interest in birds generally, or penguins in particular. I should also mention that there are a couple of pages in the back on where to see penguins. Warning: They don’t smell very good.

    I recommend the book. The following video has nothing to do with the book, but there are penguins in it:

    Don't Even Think About #ClimateChange (ADDED: Free Chapter)

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    Climate change is emotional, especially when the effects are disastrous and people’s lives are ruined. It is vague, sometimes. For example, bad weather happens and always has happened, so an increase in frequency or severity of bad weather isn’t necessarily qualitatively novel, and can be hard to put one’s finger on. Although the negative effects of climate change are already here, more serious effects are in our future. So, climate change has a component that is mysterious and hard to relate to, because it is in the future. Climate change is global, but spotty on a given day or in a given month. So, you may spend a long period of time between direct bouts with the phenomenon and forget about it or write it off as an “it can’t happen here” sort of thing. Climate change is scary or depressing, or both, so it is one of those things one tends to avoid thinking about. Climate change is complex, and climate change includes variation that is hard to understand.

    NEW: Get your free chapter of this great book from the NCSE. Click here!

    When we look at how the human mind works, using the tools of anthropology, psychology, or any of your favorite ways to study the human condition, we find that we are better at some things than others. All those things I just said about climate change are things we humans tend to be bad at, find hard to comprehend, evaluate, understand, or explain.

    Therefore, climate change has two very important characteristics. 1) It is very important, representing an existential threat that we must deal with; and 2) we are cognitively, emotionally, intellectually, pragmatically, unable to deal with it. Or, one would hope, unable to deal with it easily. Hopefully we will get past that.

    George Marshall’s Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change is a must-read book for anyone interested in messaging and communication about climate change. You may know of George Marshall’s work; he’s the guy who made that great video on “How to talk to a climate change denier” (I’ve pasted it below).

    If you know even a modest amount about climate change, and if you are likely to accept scientific consensus as valid (and the consensus on climate change is nearly 100% and is quite valid), then you may wonder how the heck people actively deny it. Less mysterious but still enigmatic is how people not actively engaged in denial don’t just accept the science. There is a handful of easy answers to these wonderments. Ignorance, financial incentive, getting bad information by a well funded and very active denialist industry, probably account for much of this. But just as climate change is something we address in science, denial of climate change, or refusal to engage in the issue, can also be addressed with science. Marshall’s book does this.

    Marshall examines why people who aren’t worried about climate change do worry about being hit by asteroids or killed by terrorists. He examines the enigmatic fact that having children, who will certainly be more affected by climate change than the parents will be, makes it more likely to deny the reality of the phenomenon. He talks about the role of myth, fiction, and stories in shaping people’s belief, as opposed to science. He looks at why victims of climate change, such as those who lost everything in a major flood or terrible storm, exhibit a personal denial of the salient facts underlying their plight.

    I have been dealing with science denial of one form or another for many years, much of that time surrounding the issue of evolution (as opposed to creationism). There are two things I’ve observed that relate to Marshall’s book. First, the patterns of cause of denialism are rarely simple. There tends to be a political cause, in some cases there tends to be a religious cause (especially with respect to evolution), there tends to be a money-related cause, and so on. But it is unrealistic to attribute denial to a simple causal agent, and one does so at one’s peril. The other observation is the commonness of well meaning people who look at denial think about if for a moment and come up with a simple fix. There isn’t a simple fix for such a complex thing. This is why Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change is a must-read book for anyone interested in messaging and communication about climate change.

    I strongly recommend this book.

    Marshall has a post on his book here. Andy Skuce has reviewed it here. The Facebook Page for the book is here. The video I promised you is here:

    Don’t Even Think About It: Why our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change—a book review

    Climate Peril: The Intelligent Reader's Guide to Understanding the Climate Crisis.

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    According to John Berger, author of the newly released book Climate Peril: The Intelligent Reader’s Guide to Understanding the Climate Crisis, time is running out. The climate is changing in ways that will bring unwanted results, and we as a species are slow off the mark to do something about it.

    Climate Peril: The Intelligent Reader’s Guide to Understanding the Climate Crisis begins with a description of the global climate in the not too distant future, 2100. It is of course a guess, perhaps fiction. But Berger’s description of the world in 2100 is plausible, and much of it probable. We don’t know, of course which parts are more vs. less likely. Killer heat waves are common. Forest are dying. Wildfires are frequent and abnormally large. Natural habitats, all of them, are being destroyed by changing conditions, causing widespread species extinctions. Serious diseases well ensconced in the tropics have spread widely. Island nations and low lying continental regions are being flooded, or are already destroyed by rising seas. And more.

    By 2100, the Arctic Ocean is virtually ice-free. That amplifies global warming, because the reflective ice is replaced by darker water, which absorbs more heat. Without the ice, walruses are virtually gone. The huge shoals of shrimp-like krill that swarmed and bred beneath the margins of the ice shelves are gone.The whales that strained tons of krill have starved. So have the krill-eating fish and seals that had eaten the fish—and that needed ice during breeding and pupping season. Polar bears that depended on the seals and that bore their young on ice have become very scarce.A small population remains on land where they interbred with grizzlies…

    With water so scarce and costly, many farms over the past decades had first fallowed their fields and, when the rains failed, had finally gone out of business.Then food prices had shot up. … Many people simply left the region. Farm economies unraveled…

    Skeletal remains of shorefront buildings and walls protruded from the surf. A congealed mass of plastic flotsam and jetsam identified the high-water mark. …

    And that is just a sampling. And, again, there is nothing in Berger’s alarming description that is “alarmist” in the sense science denialists usually use the term. Alarming, yes. Alarmist, no. Just realistic.

    Berger describes climate change and its mechanism, gives some history as to how we know what we know, and discusses the perils of climate change in several major categories: That pertaining to the United States in particular, though he also discusses the situation across the globe; economic perils, health related perils, extreme weather, extinction, and bad things that happen to the ocean.

    The hardest chapter to write, the one that is most likely wrong in detail, and at the same time, the most important, is on “Tipping Point Perils.” There is presently a discussion on the internet about one tipping point that is probably not realistic: the rapid extinction-event level warming induced by the release of large amounts of Methane from beneath the Arctic sea (and nearby land areas). Berger goes out on a limb a ways with his discussion of Methane, as do many others, and we hope there is not really a “Methane Bomb.” For the most part, though, he addresses the Arctic Methane problem fairly realistically, pointing out evidence on all sides of the issue.

    Most of Berger’s tipping points are more realistic and still quite serious, including his discussion of methane. For the most part, a “tipping point” is an out of control positive feedback, where warming induces the rapid increase of some effect which in turn increases warming. Like melting permanent ice and snow, which normally sends an important quantity of the Sun’s energy back into space. Another is the qualitative change in climate systems, such as changes to large scale oceanic currents which contribute greatly to how heat is distributed across the planet. Obviously, glacial melt is on this list as well.

    Climate Peril: The Intelligent Reader’s Guide to Understanding the Climate Crisis is a fun read. If, you know, you like non-fiction apocalyptic stories.

    An important point is this: Berger does not say the game is over. He advocates taking action and makes the claim that these perils can be addressed, and of course, must be addressed.

    Fortunately, many global studies confirm that we have the technology, financial capability, and renewable energy resources to successfully transition to an energy economy largely free of fossil fuels. But this will require some hard technological and political choices.Very large global programmatic investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy technology, agriculture, forestry, as well as carbon capture and storage will be needed to protect the climate…

    Unfortunately, the movement for climate protection and clean energy does not have 50 years to put clean energy proponents in high offices and end business-as-usual energy policies. Fortunately, grassroots political activism plus new technology sometimes produces faster results. President Obama himself used grassroots organizing and social media to gain the White House in 2008. Social media was also indispensable to the Arab Spring revolutions that began in Tunisia in 2010. But whereas many climate organizations are already active on the web, their initiatives are often lost in internet cacophony, much of it created by powerful commercial interests.

    The book has a foreword by Benjamin Santer, and an introduction by Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

    Berger has a PhD in Ecology and has been involved in environmental issues in a number of ways, including advising for the National Research Council.