End Of Nature

The End of Nature Book Review

Introduction

1 a) When Bill McKibben originally wrote this book in the late 1980s, the two observations were that we tell time badly and that our sense of scale is awry.

1 b) Nothing at all has changed, but actually gotten worse. It has increased by 15%.

1 c) Three pieces of evidence that support global warming is that sea levels will rise, warmer seasons and a lot more hurricanes will come.

1 d) Everything we do involves fossil fuels and in order to change it we would have to change the way we move around, spaces we live in and jobs we perform and food we eat.

A New Atmosphere

2 a) We believe things will happen in the future, not in our lifetime. This is wrong because things are happening in our lifetime and we will be apart of making it better but are actually being apart of making thing worse.  

2 b) When he says nature, he means the ideas about the world and our place in it. Things will still happen, the rain will still fall.

2 c) Arrhenius was the first link to increasing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to an increase in global temperature.  

2 d) The world will use more energy with the increase in population. This will make everything different. Just like misreading a receipt.

2 e) Two other sources of CO2 emission are burning forests, even worse is the rain forest, and burning of pastures where cow are located.

2 f) Termites are the same as the cows with the bacteria in their intestines. They break down carbon in wood and excrete a lot of methane. Rice Paddies - shelter methane producing bacteria. Rice plants act as straw and vent out tons of gas a year.

2 g) A lot of methane is locked up as hydrates in the tundra and in the mud of the continental shelves. If the greenhouse effect is beginning to warm the oceans and if it starts to thaw the permafrost then it could eventually start to melt those ices.

2 h) Linked to weather by causing the temperature to increase and remain hotter...