Tropics of Chaos

The premises of Parenti's tome is that andromorphic (man-made) climate change is going to devastate the world between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, that swath of the world between high summer in the northern hemisphere, and high summer in the southern hemisphere. The question is whether to adapt to the change, or to try to mitigate, stop or minimize, the change in the climate, according to Parenti. He starts right in quoting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an adjunct organization associated with the UN. The claim is that CO2 is increasing and has achieved levels not seen in 10,000 years, per ice records. CO2, per Parenti, is a greenhouse gas that works like a blanket on the earth holding in the heat, keeping it from radiating back out into space. He admits we need some CO2 to blanket the earth, or else the planet would be too cold. He continues and quotes the PEW center stating that the Earth's surface temperature has increased by 0.8C since the early years of the 20th century, that the 11 warmest years are all within the last 13 years (since 2011), and the five warmest years to date are 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, and 2007. He claims that climate change denialists have attacked the IPCC. He continues with the surmise that even a 1.0C rise will change the world enormously, and all for the bad. Measurements of atmospheric CO2 levels show that it has been steadily increasing. The ice core records for the last 500,000 years show that CO2 is a trailing indicator of warming, or cooling. The temperature increases, or decreases, and 800 to 1,000 years later, CO2 increases, or decreases. That is, temperature change causes CO2 change, not the other way around. That is scientific fact. Eight hundred or so years ago was an event called the medieval warming, and the best data we have indicates that it was 1 to 2C warmer than it is now. If you go back to 10,000 years ago, we were finally coming out of the end of the last ice age, so no temperature has been warmer than 10,000 years ago, per the ice record. As the oceans warm up or cool down, with some delay, they absorb or "exhale" CO2. Water vapor causes over 80% of the global warming, absorbing that much of the suns rays within 30 feet of the earth's surface. CO2 causes eight-one hundredths as much warming, or almost none. Of course, it is not sexy to try to control water vapor. CO2 works as a greenhouse gas in the sterile laboratory, even if it is not a very powerful greenhouse gas. In our active biosphere, CO2 causes plants to grow faster and larger - it does not cause warming or cooling. Another problem is Climategate. These intercepted E-mails, written by Global Warming Alarmists to one another, stated that they had a problem; How were they going to fool the public into thinking Global Warming was real, when the global temperature had ceased rising in 1998? The E-mail discussion revolved around falsifying the data, and obfuscating the presentation so that they, if caught, could only be charge with a scientific difference of opinion, rather than an outright falsification or distortion of the data. In the depth of the little ice age, circa 1700AD, to 1880, the earth's temperature increased by 1.55C (this was before cars and before coal fired electric plants). From 1880 to 1934, the temperature did increase about 1.75C. How did the temperature rise so much while so much of mankind was still industrializing? For the next 46 years, while CO2 levels rose, the temperature dropped, until 1980. The temperature then rose again, until 1998, but 1998 was still cooler than 1934. The temperature then dropped slightly for a half-dozen years, and has wandered sideways since then. Of course, CO2 continues to rise, but the temperature does not. 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2007 were all warm years, but they were all cooler than 1998, which was cooler than 1934. It is only through manipulation of the data that stating that these are the warmest years is used to prove that Global Warming is real, which is scientifically false. Since 1934, atmospheric CO2 has increased by 34%, but the temperature has not increased at all. If CO2, much less man-made CO2 was the problem, this is scientifically impossible. Facts are stubborn things, and Parenti has no facts on his side. As he starts in on the Pentagon and the US military mind set, he comments on a military preparedness exercise in which the Marines are wearing urban warfare combat colors, which are varying shades of gray, to blend in with the concrete roadways and buildings in a city. They wear different color uniforms in the tropics, desert, urban environments, etc, so they don't stand out as targets, like the "redcoats" in the Revolutionary War. Parenti said the Marines "gray hues invoked Nazi tunics; the patterns, a confusing and dangerous street grid in a polluted third world Megacity." Comparing our US Marines to Nazis goes a long way to explaining the mindset of this book. After the last Ice age stopped, the temperature rose about 8C, due, according to the National Geographic, as Alarmist an organization as there is, to the cycles of the sun. Shocking! How could the temperature rise so dramatically between 18,000 and 10,000 years ago with no help from mankind? The Sun, of all the darned things! So maybe, just maybe, the sun is the cause of climate change, and a great deal more research needs to go into how the Sun does that, rather than wasting the money, over $50 Billion by 2008, studying a chimera: CO2! Between about 6,500 BC, and 5,000 BC, the Sahara desert was formed. All without the help of mankind. It went from a green savanna to a desert. The folks that could, migrated to the Nile river area. The drying turned that Nile from a broad swampy area, to the river that spawned the great Egyptian civilization, over 4,500 years ago. But it was a disaster for most folks that lived far from the Nile. Parenti surmises that the "global warming" (that isn't happening), is going to cause a great deal of disruption in the poorer central and southern hemispheres. He spends some time covering various poor areas, affected by mother nature in adverse ways, such as sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, India, and Central America, including the area around the Rio Grande river. Of course, one of the main reasons there are large towns in Mexico, on the desert border with the US, is because of NAFTA, and all the Maquiladora industrial light assembly plants put up just across the border in Mexico. If there weren't jobs there, as there weren't 20 years ago, the towns would have stayed relatively small and sleepy. On page 209, Parenti, once again, compares the USA and the successful countries in the Northern Hemisphere to Nazi Germany. He states that emergencies, such as "global warming" are the means by which democracies smuggle in authoritarian, or absolutist, politics and law enforcement. What he is really arguing for is that the US should give up its sovereignty, and welcome everyone into the country, as we are all children of the world. God says I am my brothers keeper, but he also gave me freewill to choose which of my brothers I will keep. It is not up to Parenti to tell me who I should choose. "Anti-immigrant policing involves a weird alchemy in which the tools of war and a lack of due process at the border are insinuating themselves into the duties of regular law enforcement and reshaping the everyday practice of state power." The problem, is, of course, that the Federal Government has abdicated its responsibilities to ensure that the only immigration we have is legal immigration. An Illegal immigrant is a lawbreaker. That is an open and shut argument. We, the USA have the right to control our borders, and ensure that only legal immigrants are allowed inside. I say this as the son of a legal immigrant from India. If the Federal Government did its job, then there would be no need for "weird alchemy". But when the Federal Government is trying, inadvertently or otherwise, to destroy communities and states along our borders, then those state have the duty to preserve and protect their citizens. Far too many American fought for the USA, from the Revolutionary War through today, for Parenti to just throw all of that away! Of Course, since 9/11, we have slightly awakened to the mortal threat of Islam to the USA. Maybe, just maybe, we don't want a bunch of Muhammad Atta's freely entering and wandering around inside of the USA, like we did before 9/11. "Border militarization - it is all a human rights abomination". Of Course, there is an Islamist camp in the tri-border area of South America, training Jihadists to speak Spanish and act Hispanic, to blend in. No threat there! At all! Hezbollah is in Venezuela, planning on how to infiltrate nuclear bombs into the USA, once Iran has them. No threat there! Maybe keeping several hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Americans alive is too inhuman for Parenti. I would recommend reading my reviews of Barack Obama's two books,  Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance  and  The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Vintage) , and then the rest of my reviews on Amazon, to begin to have a whiff of the problem that American has with Islam, and why it is a national security imperative that we close and control our borders. Parenti spews vitriolic hatred at Governor Jan Brewer, of Arizona, and on all the folks on FOX News and conservative talk radio. Rather than engaging in dialogue, he would rather engage in name calling. It is his way or the highway. Parenti says "civilization is in a crisis, although the effects are not yet fully felt". I agree with Parenti, but it is Parenti, and those who are as ignorant as he is that are the real problem; that are causing the crisis. Parenti says we will need downward redistribution of wealth. I would like to suggest that if this is what Parenti really believes, then he and all of those that agree with him should lead the way, and give away their entire fortunes, all of their every week or monthly paycheck, to the folks that live in this climactic disaster that he has helped cause (per his beliefs). Of course, leading by example is also one of the failings of the Global Warming Alarmists. Parenti has totally failed to make his case. His fact are weak, invented, distorted, or false. His reasoning is that of a redistributionist, i.e. one of the elite, that know better for us what we should do than we know ourselves, therefore we, who aren't capable of independent critical thinking, should just do what he tells us to do, even if the entire premise is a deliberately manufactured lie. Man Made Climate Change, AKA Global Warming, is a manufactured crisis, that has no validity in science. Science Deniers, like Mr. Parenti, need a cold bucket of water, and the opportunity to actually learn something about the subject, rather than just blindly accepting the pap and pablum of the alarmist crowd.

I've been an atmospheric scientist, in one capacity or another, for 40 years. During the last 20 years I've been telling people (in formal settings such as classrooms, and informal settings, such as library talks) that anthropomorphic climate change is starting to run away, because of built-in feedbacks in the system. Other far more famous people, such as James Hansen, have been doing the same thing. (See Hansen's book, "Storms of My Grandchildren." There are many other excellent books that have grappled with this.) To put it bluntly, what we have been trying to get across to the world is that, once this beast gets rolling, it will be impossible to stop it on any time scale that's meaningful to human beings. And to be clear: We are causing this mess. That has been very clearly and rigorously demonstrated. The end result will probably be a long-duration hothouse Earth, for which there is historical precedent.We have encountered many professional "skeptics," many of whom are either uninformed or deliberate liars. Because of confirmation bias, millions of people buy the bunk they are selling. Some of their customers are so dug into their delusions that no amount of evidence will ever change their minds. I have given up trying. And I will probably get trolled for typing these words.I'm only part way into Parenti's book, and already I find his thesis and his writing compelling. The author describes our predicament as the convergence of several simultaneous and interlocking problems, including global warming leading to climate change, neoliberalism throughout the Global South that has hamstrung government's ability to intervene with effective measures, and militarism. I could go on, but I recommend you read the book. I'll probably tear through it in the next couple of days.Thanks for reading.

Anyone interested in climate change needs to read this book.

Excellent overview of the catastrophe that is gathering as climate change combines with free-market economics and military intervention to reduce some parts of the world to violent chaos.

Good and educative

We are living this now and it is a hard read and yet nothing is being done to stop this. Well written and Christian clearly had a vision as to where we are heading.

This book provided me with a much needed illuminating and holistic picture of geographical, historical, political and sociological factors converging with ongoing and accelerating climate change in this region across Africa. A must read as an effective framework for understanding the unfolding of converging catastrophe here and in and in other portions of the world.