This is a good review from Yale:
Voices of reason and clear analyses in the contentious debates about how to tackle our global problems are welcome. Unfortunately, the book is deeply and fatally flawed. At the simplest level, it is a polemic based on a strawman argument: To Shellenberger, scientists, “educated elite,” “activist journalists,” and high-profile environmental activists believe incorrectly that the end of the world is coming and yet refuse to support the only solutions that he thinks will work – nuclear energy and uninhibited economic growth.
But even if the author properly understood the complexity and nature of global challenges, which he does not, and got the science right, which he did not, a fatal flaw in his argument is the traditional Cornucopian oversimplification of his solutions – reliance on economic growth and silver-bullet technology. As the great American journalist and humorist H. L. Mencken said, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.” Mencken also warned against those who know precisely what is right and what is wrong, a warning especially worth hearing in the highly complex and uncertain worlds of global climate, pandemics, and environmental change.
But the problems in the book go much deeper. The author wanders from topic to topic, jumping from personal anecdote to polemical arguments to data and numbers carefully chosen to support his views, making it difficult for the reader to follow his threads. The most serious flaw, however, is that he assumes a position and seeks data and facts to fit that position rather than, as science demands, using data and facts to develop, test, and refine a theory. As a result, the book suffers from logical fallacies, arguments based on emotion and ideology, the setting up and knocking down of strawman arguments, and the selective cherry-picking and misuse of facts, all interspersed with simple mistakes and misrepresentations of science. Distressingly, this is also an angry book, riddled with ugly ad hominem attacks on scientists, environmental advocates, and the media.
This is a welcomed response but while reading through this review I found myself recognizing one bad-faith argument after another mounting on top of factually erroneous claims.
Here is a good response from Micheal Shellenberger to the review you posted.
In Apocalypse Never I explicitly acknowledge climate change’s potentially negative impacts on food production and point out that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and every other major scientific body conclude that fertilizer, irrigation, flood control, roads, tractors, and other technologies needed to increase yields massively outweigh rising temperatures around the world, including in poor and developing nations in the tropics.
Gleick, for his part, offers no reason to expect declining food production, much less famine. Food surpluses have been rising gradually for millennia and especially in the 220 years since Thomas Malthus wrote his famous tract, claiming that humans were doomed to periodic starvation.
Gleick falsely accuses me of cherry-picking a quote from a 2019 New York Times story on Amazon fires. “If you look at the actual article he cites,” writes Gleick, “the journalist makes clear the “influence” of climate change just two sentences later.” But, as noted above, I have never suggested there wasn’t an influence, just that it is outweighed by other factors.
Gleick confuses the reader about the relationship between disasters and extreme weather events. A hurricane whose wind speed has been made more intense by climate change but doesn’t hurt anyone or destroy property, is not a disaster, according to IPCC, dictionaries, and common sense. And yet Gleick conflates the two concepts, leading readers to believe that we have become more vulnerable. “In fact,” he writes, “a large and growing body of literature already shows strong links between climate change and extreme events…” But I never deny those links and indeed address them specifically in Apocalypse Never.
Gleick defends Holdren and the Ehrlichs as part of his broader defense of Malthusianism. Gleick claims they did not claim fossil fuels were scarce in the 1970s, and points to a book published in 2003 where Holdren said, “What environmentalists mainly say on this topic is not that we are running out of energy, but that we are running out of environment…”
But I make this exact point in Apocalypse Never. I show how Malthusians have used climate change to shift from claiming fossil fuels were scarce to claiming that the environment was scarce. “Where just a few years earlier, Malthusians had demanded limits on energy consumption by claiming fossil fuels were scarce; now they demanded limits by claiming the atmosphere was scarce.”
In his review of Apocalypse Never, Gleick does something similar. He suggests that I am wrong that hydro-electric dams, flood control systems, and nuclear power plants will allow human societies to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. I believe Gleick is wrong to do so, in both senses of the term “wrong.” I’m sad about that, not angry.
A few additional problems I had with Peter's review that Michael doesn't touch on. While the surface of Peter's presentation appears valid digging even slightly into his references or claims uncovered what could charitably be called shoddy references. On Cornucopian he literally links to opinion pieces written by anonymous sources. Such as this article in
The Atlantic or a
Christian Monitor Freelance Journalist article by Kurt Cobb on his personal blog, and the strongest citation he makes is to the Bankruptcy of Economics which, and I'm not even joking here, was written by an Australian businessman, Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, and a Lecturer in Philosophy at Flinders University.
That's how the writers themselves present their credentials. Although, we are not done yet scrapping the bottom of the barrel as when looking at the
Altmetric of the text its citation value is found to be 6 blogs. One of which is The review you posted. Printed in 1999 it was never reprinted and little wonder why. The one and only academic citation that references this work is Kumudini Abeysuriya, Cynthia Mitchell, Juliet Willetts paper on Economic perspective for water sustainability.
As an aside, wouldn't you know it guess whose name pops up in the other citations on that paper? Give yourself three guesses and the first two don't count.
