Sensationalist, manipulative science fact
585897
Of all the sins that Richard Preston committed in his dramatic account of the Ebola outbreak at the quarantine facilities in Reston, Va., the most unacceptable was his seeming unwillingness to emphasize that that particular strain of Ebola posed no harm to people.  While I agree that the people going into the 'hot zone' did not know that at the time, he knew when writing the book that the strain was not dangerous to humans.  To me, this is rampant sensationalism, not befitting a book which is placed in the science section.
Addtionally, the public health officials assigned to Reston did an excellent job of containment, and even if the strain had been lethal to humans, there should not be a distraction from that fact.  It is unfortunate to me that most people's understanding of the Ebola virus will come from books like this and movies like 'Outbreak.'  While Ebola is certainly a lethal and fearful virus, it has thus far been limited in its spread.
Preston's book does not showcase the excellent steps made by public health officials, does not highlight the true nature of the viral strain in Reston, and most of all, attempts to strike up fear as a means to increase sales.
People should not be comparing a true medical story to Stephen King.  That comparison alone should be sufficient to illustrate that the book is not balanced and has one goal: to frighten.  In a world that is already frightening enough, a balanced, fair perspective is owed to the public on issues as horrifying as hemorrhagic fevers.
It is what Richard Preston owed his readers; it is what he failed to deliver.
1276018
Evidently, and sadly, this is what passes for "science" at a Christian college.  As you read through the book, you can easily search the internet to find *real* scientists offering correct answers that the author seems unaware of. This is exactly what I did.  A few examples:
1. If radioactive decay occurred over thousand of years rather than billions, in the early years of the earth (a claim with no scientific basis), then a simple calculation shows the energy released would have vaporized the surface of the Earth.
2. C-14 dating is inherently tricky and prone to occasional contamination, so occasional bad data shouldn't surprise us. The notable O.J. Simpson case may have involved cross-contamination. Contamination doesn't prove that DNA (or C-14) analysis is itself flawed. In this book, the author seems unaware that substances like coal are prone to contamination and that diamond is difficult to combust. At every turn the author tries to mislead.
3. Helium diffusion in Zircons: PhD Gary H. Loechelt has explained in detail the numerous errors the author has made here... [...]
2861364
On the one hand this is a very interesting book. It gives a deft synopsis of what has been going on in the fields of evolutionary and mind sciences in the outgoing two decades. Horgan provides a lot of information about the  persons who play an outstanding role in these fields. As such, the book is  valuable. He also warns for too much gullibilty in accepting the claims  made by scientists who present new insights, which is a usefull  exercise.
But on the other hand, even more than in his earlier book  "The end of science", Horgan can be outrageously negative. He  does not like mind science. He does not like evolutionary biology. At  times, his scepticism grows really malignant, when he deliberately  selectively cites authorities in order to discredit their theories.  Personnally, I prefer the enthousiasm of Tooby and Cosmides, Gerald  Edelman, Daniel Dennet and Steven Pinker to this negative nagging about  what really are very interesting theories. Of course there is a certain  danger that such enthousiasts get carried away by their pet theories, but I  prefer these "trumpeteers of the new time" to this  "nattering nabob of negativism". Always yelling that the emperor  has  no clothes, is rather cheap.
4260932
I haven't read the whole book yet, and I can see it contains a lot of valuable and useful information about soil management and improvement, but her comments about so-called "global warming" are nothing but new-age false religion nonsense! The planets in our solar system have also heated up slightly, and they have no factories nor internal combustion engines that I know of. The truth is the sun's heat output waxes and wanes, and this natural fluctuation directly affects the temperature of the planets which revolve around it, including the earth. See "Climate Change the Facts." Get real, people!
2244019
"The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global warming (and Environmentalism)" is, mostly, poor, due to too much ranting and raving.
However, I consider it better than Gore's "An Inconvienient Truth".  First, there are more facts.  Second, more of the facts are true.  Third, the author actually has more references than Gore's book did.

Unfortunately, both books, this one as well as Gore's, are more about Propaganda than about real science.

I suggest that you seek out a bunch of other books on these subjects and find real data.  Personally, my look at the data and the literature seems to show some global warming but not nearly as bad as Gore contends.  And, there seems to be stronger and stronger evidence that the warming is not, entirely, due to man's activities.

From my own look at the data and literature, I thing Christtopher C. Horner tells some real whoppers.  But, so does Gore.  So, buyer BEWARE!
904195
For thirty years, energy engineer Randall Hughes has been frustrated by widespread misinformation on the subject of energy, chemical use, and other targets of environmentalists wrath.

His frustration has resulted in a book that tackles major public deceptions, written for a layman. It can be enjoyed by anyone with a desire to forego technical jargon and get to the bottom of these tough and important issues. He has succeeded so well I do not know quite where to start in praising the book. I encourage you to make it a Christmas present for the open-minded on your gift list.

-Many Subjects-

To set up his observations about popular deceptions, Hughes surfs across subjects known to many of us, including autism, asthma, ozone, golden rice, and prairie chickens. He explains the evolution of lies and the reasons some individuals and groups have little problem playing the deception game to achieve hidden agendas. The table of contents includes more than 120 items, making it easy to navigate the book for quick reference.

Hughes shows so many of todays headlines use nothing more than cherry-picked statistics, and he demonstrates most green initiatives are often motivated more by someones financial gain than saving Earth. Randall supports his arguments with 311 footnotes.

His cost data is exceptional. For example, he wrote, The costs and actions required to comply with the new ozone standard alone is projected to destroy 7.3 million jobs and cost the nation one trillion dollars by 2020. These aren't the numbers well hear from the mainstream media and certainly not the message well hear from the environmental lobby.
Hughes does a nice job explaining unconscionable battles against phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA), and chlorine chemicals, and he documents how our children are being brought up on cartoons aimed at sowing fear and mistrust of the free market and industry.

-EPA: Job Killer-

Among the books 22 chapters, Hughes spends the most time on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), referring to it as the Employment Prevention Agency. Most of our readers know EPA has become a travesty, but few understand the details he conveys so simply.

Randalls chapters on global warming provide an excellent review for the general reader. Of particular interest is Hughes exposure of 150 years of New York Times fear-mongering headlines concerning weather that promote the papers absurd opinions of mans impact on todays climate. Consider these as examples:

Jan. 2 1870Ice Melts Suddenly on the Hudson River
June 23, 1890Winters Are Not So Cold Anymore
Dec 16, 1934Colder Winters Than in Grandfathers Day
Jan 30, 1961Experts Agree Climate Is Getting Colder
July 18, 1970US and Russia Researching Why World Is Getting Colder

-Very Cold-

Among the many refreshing insights in the book is a report Hughes uncovered from a PR firm for environmental activists that promotes scuzzy talking points such as, the argument is already won, the skeptics are paid experts, talk about human values not science, avoid discussing costs, and alarmism can be a good thing.

Hughes is at his best when explaining how the world works, such as why the mainstream media strive so diligently against the truth: The news media is not in business to deliver facts. Theyre in business to sell advertising. The more they increase subscription rates or increase viewers and listeners, the more they can charge for airing commercials. The news itself may be a public service, but the bottom line for the news media is the same as it is for any major corporation, making a profit. The news is designed to shock, surprise and entertainall in an attempt to increase audience size and increase profits. Thats why catastrophe, scandal, corruption and environmental wrong doing gets top billing.

And thats why you need to read this book and provide copies to your family and friends.

Jay Lehr, Ph. D., (jlehr@heartland.org) is science director at The Heartland Institute.
618939
Excellent propoganda!
With regards to the number of cherry-picked examples, hakf-truths, poorly operated studies, and misinformation contained within, as well as blatant political motivations, this book would be excellent for someone discussing and disecting propganda.

This book does attempt to get you to draw your own conclusions, unfortunately it uses flawed studies as the basis in these attempts. Its best to get your scientific information from people who take the climate and science seriously. I.e. actual scientists and peer-reviewed materials.

Alas, you can probably get your copy for free, since this quasi-science has been mailed around the US in an attempt to influence politics akin to the pseudo-science put out by cigarette companies years back.
1222353
A factually written book which neither bolsters, nor denies completely the phenomenon known to most as "Global Warming". It does uncover some erroneous information that most of the Media "Love" to feed the "Spoon Fed" public..
230106
Inconsistent Truth hits the propaganda from Al Gore right on. Couple years ago my daughter did a term paper on Global Warming, everything covered the facts as nothing but idealistic rhetoric, never sustaining the real facts, she was able to defuse all the arguments presents by the global warming extremest. The Inconsistent Truth supports that term paper. Phil Valentine articulates what I have always believed but did not have the skills necessary to debunk the arguments, Inconsistent Truth does that.
I do believe that we should do something about trashing our waters, Environmentalist sometimes actually can have the right commentaries but loose the argument when extrapolating pollution with 'Global Warming'
Phil V. does a great job exposing the hype.
3630971
This book is pseudoscience masquerading as the real thing. It is in the tradition of Plato's Atlantis, Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, and any number of fantasies in between about cosmic catastrophes. Although lead author Richard Firestone writes well and has impeccable scientific credentials, in this book he becomes an advocate for the dark side of popular science. Some of the assertions in this book are reasonable, but many are not. Among this biggest howlers is the assertion that more than 100,000 of the elliptical depressions called the Carolina Bays are the result of recent cosmic impacts - impacts of a size that we know happen on Earth individually only once in several millennia. Alternatively, this book suggests that the Carolina Bays are the result of secondary impacts by ejecta from a single super impact that also created Hudson Bay. This impact, which they propose happened only 12,900 years ago, would thus have been much larger than the hit 65 million years ago that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Needless to add, no geologists have found any of signatures of impacts in Hudson Bay. Another weird notion is the assertion that mastodons living on Earth 34,000 years ago were exposed directly to a huge hypervelocity blast wave from a very nearby supernova, imbedding cosmic particles in their tusks. The issue of how these almost microscopic particles made it through the Earth's atmosphere without being slowed apparently does not worry them. Judging by other reviews posted here, a lot of non-scientists liked this book. I am again reminded of Velikovsky, whose work was highly praised by nonscientists but immediately rejected by scientists. If you want to read this book for entertainment as imaginative science fiction, fine, but don't confuse it with real science.
1100865
There are two types of individuals in the scientific community who will challenge the information in this book, armchair biologists who believe that nature can be studied without extensive field experience and those who believe that mathematics is God.  Because of the cognitive handicaps which these types must possess because of their viewpoints, their comments can be disregarded.  This book points out a problem that has plagued the biological sciences for several decades, overmathematization.  Modeling is glitzy, popular and impresses the naive.  In journals such as Global Change Biology models fill the pages, indicating that including models is a key to successful publication.  The Pilkeys have issued a warning which must be heeded in order to return to a point where we search for understanding the world rather than for faddistic crutches used enhance the ostentatiousness of our publications.

  The railings of the anti-environmentalists can be summarily disregarded.
1669879
In light of the distortions published in this book, below are some
facts that were left out of this otherwise well-researched book. The
authors might call these deception my omission ACSH is a not for
profit organization led by a voluntary board of more than 350 leading
physicians and scientists from prominent hospitals and universities-

 ACSH's work is not only peer-reviewed by these leading independent
scientists, but ACSH reports are then further reviewed and published
by mainstream medical and scientific journals with no connection to
ACSH.
 Some of the scientific and professional journals that have
recently published ACSH's work include: Medscape (the online medical
journal edited by former JAMA editor Dr. George Lundberg), CRC
Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory Sciences, Exotoxicology and
Environmental Safety, Journal of Health Communications, Clinical
Therepeutics, and Technology.
 ACSH has a long history of going
where the science takes it, even when that science is counter to the
interest of its funders.
 For instance, ACSH regularly criticizes
industries who are guilty of making unscientific and overstated health
claims promoting dangerous natural supplements, failing to tell the
truth about scientific issues including industry's failure to defend
the safety of genetically modified foods.
In other words, its not
just tobacco. ACSH regularly criticizes all of those responsible for
distorting the truth about important public health issues.
 Bottom
line: ACSH is an organization that plays by the rules of science. ACSH
doesn't buy slick ads and make ad hominem attacks. ACSH focus their
resources towards responsible science. None of the wealthy Naderite
organizations can point to a board of scientific advisors as
prestigious as ACSH's, and unlike ACSH, they cannot point to a record
of independently published scientific work.  Its no wonder they are
forced to take the low road.
541875
State of Fear delivers an exciting suspense novel, but when it comes to providing a scientific refutation of the global warming theory, it provides more of a veneer of a scientific argument rather than one with a strong foundation. Consider the following. Many scientific facts are presented, and these would seem to discredit the theory. For example charts of temperature readings at several locations are presented showing cooling trends rather than warming patterns. However, these locations number less than fifty. Since global warming is a net effect, a true, representative sample of events occurring on the surface of the globe would require millions of locations. His method of sampling locations is never mentioned nor are the many obvious and not so obvious factors that might affect temperature at these locations. In an appendix he references the eugenics movement in his citisism of environmentalists, and this analogy seems like quite a stretch. Given that the course of events on the planet and within scientific circles since his book was written do not support his point of view, perhaps he would like to reconsider.
4495046
In the past few years people outside of the academic pursuit of genetics have been fed terms like secret to life, code of life, and other central dogmas.  Very misleading, very wrong.  Holdrege does an excellent job of explaining why this is so in terms that is understandable to anyone.  It may not spark a revival in Goethe's method but it will dispel the illusions cast by advertisment, the media, and science itself.  A must buy for a philosopher, a scientist, or anyone looking to enlighten themselves above what CNN headlines feed you.
1862039
It is not science because it hand picks it data and makes non-falsifiable claims. Also it is biased because it focus on the industrial interest to implement cap-and-trade even though the industrial interest on the warming denial side are much bigger and the majority of lobbying is thus on that side.

Instead of wasting your money and time on this book watch the "How it all ends" series on YouTube. It explains how the scientific process works and what a scientific consensus mean. It also shows how we can decide what we should do, even thought global warming is (an will never be) certain.
4714639
Thawed

This pamphlet has many excellent points going for it. It explains some of the major reasons why so many Americans reject the evidence for human-caused climate change (a political phenomena seen chiefly in the USA and Australia: people on the rest of the planet overwhelmingly accept the fact that humans have caused and are causing climate change, of which global warming is one component). The pamphlet also explains the scientific method, and why humanity can and should tentatively accept the conclusions of scientists.

The author pointed out that after scientists publish their conclusions derived by their studies, they beg and plead other scientists to disprove and to find flaws in those conclusions--- a requirement found in science, but never in religion or politics. Only after conclusions survive the relentless assault from peers within the specific science venue ("falsification" attempts), will the conclusions be tentatively accepted. (The author did not mention the fact that before scientists publish their conclusions, they work hard to refute those conclusions themselves.) This "peer review" process is not 100% successful in screening out errors, but it is the best process humanity has ever come up with so far for determining that which is false from that which is most likely correct.

Note I wrote "tentatively" and "most likely correct:" science deals with levels of confidence, and never certainty. Regarding the evidence for human-caused climate change, nearly 100% of the world's experts in the related science venues agree that humans have caused and are causing climate change, and that the change has been, is, and will be disastrous: but those conclusions are still accepted tentatively, in the extremely unlikely event that the conclusions are wrong.

When scientists want to know if a hypothesis is most likely true, they work very hard to disprove the hypothesis. They do not work to "prove" that it is true. Deniers of science, and in this case deniers of the evidence for human-caused climate change, refuse to accept the fact that the world's scientists have already tried extremely hard, for nearly 200 years, to disprove the physics involved in human-caused climate change: that falsification attempt has been going on since the 1820s, with Joseph Fourier!

If human-caused climate change had not happened and were not happening, the world's scientists would not all agree otherwise.

The pamphlet corrected debunked (not "refuted") many of the common claims made by deniers of the evidence for human-caused climate change.

For one example, the bizarre assertion that all of the world's climatologists forgot the fact that Earth has clouds: a claim I have seen made by several evidence-deniers.

For another example, the false assertion that scientists have not accounted for what is known as the "urban heat island effect:" thermometers near urban areas that are inaccurate due to improper location such as near buildings. The fact is that the effect has been measured, and globally the effect has been found to be negligible. The effect was measured to be negative (-0.19c) with the error bars being plus or minus 0.19c

This pamphlet is a good overview of the science involved. I'm not convinced the pamphlet was worth the three dollars I paid for it, since all of the facts inside are freely and readily available elsewhere.
3727843
There is so much sensationalism in the book. I am happy I read it because it contains a number of references to interesting scientific experiments; to get any value out of them you need to completely disregard Broad's musings and analyse the experiments for yourself (you can't be quite sure if the results are not presented with a slant too, though). There is no method and no discipline in his critique; in his reasoning or even book planning he jumps all over the place and his thinking is completely arbitrary. Yoga/sex relationship is analysed on the grounds that they both cause fast breathing (seriously!), while weight loss aspects of yoga are reduced to metabolism only. It's easy to "refute" anything with such nonsensical setup of one's arguments. If you had anything to do with science you will be disappointed at the standard evidently approved and endorsed by NYT. I am not a regular reader so I was amazed at what passes as science there. It doesn't read like an academic or even popular science book; it reads like printed blog entries.

There are numerous academic responses online, calling out Broad on a number of occurances of makey-uppy science and no data behind claims. They permeate the book though, and it's not (only) sloppiness, it's the author's selling strategy to generate hype, as evidenced by selecting the most "scandalous" bits to be promoted as articles whenever a new edition is released, even though they are rarely backed up with anything else than anecdotal evidence and bombastic claims.

I would definitely read a real "The Science of Yoga Book", where disciplined authors would revisit the topic and back up their findings, whether they are positive or harmful to yoga's image. To claim this title for this sloppy book is quite galling, though. It's not science, it's hype.