State of Fear

Streutker, D. R. "Satellite-measured growth of the urban heat island of Houston, Texas."Remote Sensing of Environment 85 (2003): 282-89. "Between 1987 and 1999, the mean nighttime surface temperature heat island of Houston increased 0.82 +- 0.10 degC."

 

Sunstein, Cass R. Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. A law professor examines major environmental issues from the standpoint of cost-benefit analysis and concludes that new mechanisms for assessing regulations are needed if we are to break free of the current pattern of "hysteria and neglect"in which we aggressively regulate minor risks while ignoring more significant ones. The detailed chapter on arsenic levels is particularly revealing for anyone wishing to understand the difficulties that rational regulation faces in a highly politicized world.

 

Sutherland, S. K., and W. R. Lane. "Toxins and mode of envenomation of the common ringed or blue-banded octopus."Medical Journal Australia 1 (1969): 893-98.

 

Tengs, Tammo O., Miriam E. Adams, Joseph S. Plitskin, Dana Gelb Safran, Joanna E. Siegel, Milton C. Weinstein, and John D. Graham. "Five hundred life-saving interventions and their cost effectiveness."Risk Analysis 15, no. 3(1995): 369-90. The Harvard School of Public Health is dismissed in some quarters as a right-wing institution. But this influential and disturbing study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis of the costs of regulation has not been disputed. It implies that a great deal of regulatory effort is wasted, and wasteful.

 

Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500 -1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Are environmental attitudes a matter of fashion? Thomas's delightful book charts changing perceptions of nature from a locus of danger, to a subject of worshipful appreciation, and finally to the beloved wilderness of elite aesthetes.

 

Thompson, D. W. J., and S. Solomon. "Interpretation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change."Science 296 (2002): 895-99.

 

Tommasi, Mariano, and Kathryn Lerulli, eds. The New Economics of Human Behavior. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

 

US Congress. Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Weather Control. United States Congress. Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2003.

 

Victor, David G. "Climate of Doubt: The imminent collapse of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming may be a blessing in disguise. The treaty's architecture is fatally flawed."The Sciences (Spring 2001): 18-23. Victor is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an advocate of carbon emission controls who argues that "prudence demands action to check the rise in greenhouse gases, but the Kyoto Protocol is a road to nowhere."

 

Viscusi, Kip. Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Start at section III.

 

------. Rational Risk Policy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. The author is a professor of law and economics at Harvard.

 

Vyas, N. K., M. K. Dash, S. M. Bhandari, N. Khare, A. Mitra, and P. C. Pandey. "On the Secular Trends in Sea Ice Extent over the Antarctic Region Based on OCEANSAT-1 MSMR Observations."International Journal of Remote Sensing 24 (2003): 2277-87.

 

Wallack, Lawrence, Katie Woodruff, Lori Dorfman, and Iris Diaz. News for a Change: An Advocate's Guide to Working with the Media. London: Sage Publications, 1999.

 

Weart, Spencer R. The Discovery of Global Warming. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

 

West, Darrell M. The Rise and Fall of the Media Establishment. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2001.

 

White, Geoffrey M. Identity Through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

 

Wigley, Tom. "Global Warming Protocol: CO2, CH4and climate implications."Geophysical Research Letters 25, no. 13 (1 July 1998): 2285-88.

 

Wildavsky, Aaron. But Is It True? A Citizen's Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. A professor of political science and public policy at Berkeley turned his students loose to research both the history and the scientific status of major environmental issues: DDT, Alar, Love Canal, asbestos, the ozone hole, global warming, acid rain. The book is an excellent resource for a more complete discussion of these issues than is usually provided. For example, the author devotes twenty-five pages to the history of the DDT ban, twenty pages to Alar, and so on. Wildavsky concludes that nearly all environmental claims have been either untrue or wildly overstated.

 

------. Searching for Safety. New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction, 1988. If we want a safe society and a safe life, how should we go about getting it? A good-humored exploration of strategies for safety in industrial society. Drawing on data from a wide range of disciplines, Wildavsky argues that resilience is a better strategy than anticipation, and that anticipatory strategies (such as the precautionary principle) favor the social elite over the mass of poorer people.