LeBlanc, Steven A., and Katherine E. Register. Constant Battles. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. The myth of the noble savage and the Edenic past dies hard. LeBlanc is one of the handful of archaeologists who have given close scrutiny to evidence for past warfare and has worked to revise an academic inclination to see a peaceful past. LeBlanc argues that primitive societies fought constantly and brutally.
Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Second Edition. London: Longman, 1995. In the sixteenth century, the educated elites of Europe believed that certain human beings had made contracts with the devil. They believed that witches gathered to perform horrific rites, and that they flew across the sky in the night. On the basis of these beliefs, these elites tortured countless people, and killed 50,000 to 60,000 of their countrymen, mostly old women. However, they also killed men and children, and sometimes (because it was thought unseemly to burn a child) they imprisoned the children until he or she was old enough to be executed. Most of the extensive literature on witchcraft (including the present volume) does not in my view fully come to grips with the truth of this period. The fact that so many people were executed for a fantasy--and despite the reservations of prominent skeptics--carries a lesson that we must always bear in mind. The consensus of the intelligentsia is not necessarily correct, no matter how many believe it, or for how many years the belief is held. It may still be wrong. In fact, it may bevery wrong. And we must never forget it. Because it will happen again. And indeed it has.
Lilla, Mark. The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: New York Review of Books, 2001. This razor-sharp text focuses on twentieth-century philosophers but serves as a reminder of the intellectual's temptation "to succumb to the allure of an idea, to allow passion to blind us to its tyrannical potential."
Lindzen, Richard S. "Do Deep Ocean Temperature Records Verify Models?"Geophysical Research Letters 29, no. 0 (2002): 10.1029/2001GL014360. Changes in ocean temperature cannot be taken as a verification of GCMs, computer climate models.
----. "The Press Gets It Wrong: Our Report Doesn't Support the Kyoto Treaty."Wall Street Journal, 11 June 2001. This brief essay by a distinguished MIT professor summarizes one example of the way the media misinterprets scientific reports on climate. In this case, the National Academy of Sciences report on climate change, widely claimed to say what it did not. Lindzen was one of eleven authors of the report. http://opinionjournal. com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000606
Lindzen, R. S., and K. Emanuel. "The Greenhouse Effect." InEncyclopedia of Global Change, Environmental Change and Human Society. Volume 1. Andrew S. Goudie, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 562-66. What exactly is the greenhouse effect everybody talks about but nobody ever explains in any detail? A brief, clear summary.
Liu, J., J. A. Curry, and D. G. Martinson. "Interpretation of Recent Antarctic Sea Ice Variability."Geophysical Research Letters 31 (2004): 10.1029/2003 GL018732.
Lomborg, Bjorn. The Skeptical Environmentalist. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. By now, many people know the story behind this text: The author, a Danish statistician and Greenpeace activist, set out to disprove the views of the late Julian Simon, an economist who claimed that dire environmental fears were wrong and that the world was actually improving. To Lomborg's surprise, he found that Simon was mostly right. Lomborg's text is crisp, calm, clean, devastating to established dogma. Since publication, the author has been subjected to relentless ad hominem attacks, which can only mean his conclusions are unobjectionable in any serious scientific way. Throughout the long controversy, Lomborg has behaved in exemplary fashion. Sadly, his critics have not. Special mention must go to theScientific American, which was particularly reprehensible. All in all, the treatment accorded Lomborg can be viewed as a confirmation of the postmodern critique of science as just another power struggle. A sad episode for science.
Lovins, Amory B. Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Perhaps the most important advocate for alternative energy wrote this anti-nuclear energy text in the 1970s for Friends of the Earth, elaborating on an influential essay he wrote forForeign Affairs the year before. The resulting text can be seen as a major link in the chain of events and thinking that set the US on a different energy path from the nations of Europe. Lovins is trained as a physicist and is a MacArthur Fellow.
McKendry, Ian G. "Applied Climatology."Progress in Physical Geography 27, no. 4 (2003): 597-606. "Recent studies suggest that attempts to remove the 'urban bias' from long-term climate records (and hence identify the magnitude of the enhanced greenhouse effect) may be overly simplistic. This will likely continue to be a contentious issue...."