Part II - Hot Flat & Crowded -Thomas Freidman

Part II (The parts are not based on the parts in the book but roughly based on my reading and review of the book)

I was unaware of the fact that things might be a lot worse and scarier than portrayed in the media or in the IPCC report. In the book Friedman says ‘ The scientists are punished for overstating and not punished for understating…..To make climate models scientists take little pieces of information of what we know happened in the past, check how it corresponds to how it actually happened and then try to project into the future from the earlier trend lines’

Bill Collins a senior scientists in the Earth Sciences division of the Lawrence berkely National Laboratory says ‘Nobody captured in their energy models the acceleration of emissions from china in the last five years. That is what is so scary. A lot of IPCC math was developed when emissions from China were going down in the 1990s and the Soviet Union was collapsing. What is happening now is worse than the worse case projections that went into the IPCC model’

IPCC builds a summary for policy makers, which is what we are all familiar with. The book talks about how the policy document is reviewed line by line by government representatives and they get to veto anything they don’t like. Click here for more information on how this is done. There is criticism that the summary doesn’t represent exact science and perhaps downplays the impact of global warming! What crazy weird world do we live in? The mankind itself is in danger and we lowball it! The policy makers should perhaps be tried for crimes against humanity. These people are no different than the perpetrators of genocide. If we cannot trust these reports to be accurate, what else can we not trust? I guess we know the answer to that question!

John Holdren who has spent much of his life studying the aspects of climate change Issue, has what he wryly calls “Holdren’s first principal “when it comes to climate change. It goes like this ‘The more aspects of the problem you know something about, the more pessimistic you are. Someone who studies atmospheric science is pessimistic. Some one who knows atmospheric science and oceans is more pessimistic and someone who knows atmospheric science, oceans and ice is even more pessimistic and someone who knows about atmospheric science, oceans , ice and biology is still more pessimistic and someone who knows about all those things , as well as engineering , economics , and politics is the most pessimistic of all – because then you know how long it takes to change all the systems that are driving the problem


Climate change discussion is not complete with out discussing the climate change deniers.
“If ninety eight doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say ‘No, he doesn’t need any medication. He’s fine’, I will go with the ninety-eight. It’s common sense - same with global warming we go with the majority, the large majority” says California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

Friedman says “I’m convinced that Climate change is real. But we not only need people to accept that it’s real, but also to accept just how real it could be…”

The book also talks about Dr Heidi Cullen, a Climatologist for the weather channel who says ‘Local meteorologist should give climate change science some mention in there daily weather reports’. Dr Cullen’s blog ‘Junk Controversy Not Junk Science’ did create a controversy. I have always wondered why the meteorologist don’t talk about this when it is so relevant and also has AMS (American Meteorological Society) seal. You know one would think meteorologist would know better, it turns out, they don’t.

To be continued in Part III