Yesterday at our MIT seminar, we heard a presentation from Michael Specter of The New Yorker, who will soon be out with a book called Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. I won’t say more about its contents yet, but suffice it to say that while this book may sound a lot like The Republican War on Science or Unscientific America–all the way down to the cover image with the trusty test tube/beaker–it actually appears to be pretty different, in a good way. I’m hoping I’ll have a lot more to say about it soon.
Meanwhile, I’ve just gotten an email notification that an even bigger scientific publishing event is happening: Timed for the IPCC-Copenhagen Summit, famed climatologist James Hansen will be out with a book entitled Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, with an initial press run of 100,000 copies by Bloomsbury USA. I can’t yet seem to find a good image of the book, so I’ll do without one here–but it sounds like Hansen is going to upbraid the world, and the U.S., for moving way too slowly and lamely on climate change, and basically lay it all out there–if we don’t do something really radical, it’s going to be too late. No doubt this is going to be a very, very important statement.
So look out for both books…..
October 14th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
The statement that African leaders prefer to let their citizens starve rather than import GMOs is pure market fundamentalism. It eliminates the entire history of GMO crops – their contribution to monoculture, the way the makers of GMO crops have actually caused people TO starve with their actual malevolent practices, etc.
Market fundamentalism is the elephant in the room. Anyone who buys into it, like Specter, is simply pushing a politically correct pseudoscience.