concrete

Book review – How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

8-minute read
keywords: climate change, energy, technology

The complexity of modern civilization is somewhat of a double-edged sword. It has brought great advances in human health and well-being, yet a full understanding of the sum-total of our knowledge of how the world works is now far beyond any single person. Consequently, getting people to agree on how to tackle complex problems becomes this much harder. In How The World Really Works, energy expert and policy analyst Vaclav Smil provides the big picture of the material and energetic basis undergirding human civilization, and what this means for attempts at addressing climate change. Rich in eye-opening facts and not a little bit opinionated, this is a much-needed reality check that purposefully avoids extreme views of both the techno-optimist and catastrophist kind.

(more…)

Book review – Sticking Together: The Science of Adhesion

5-minute read

Are you the kind of person who reaches for screws and nails rather than glue when you need to stick two things together? So am I. And if I am to believe chemist Steven Abbott, that is not the only thing I am mistaken in. I was initially confused when I saw this book. Why is the Royal Society of Chemistry publishing a book about adhesion, surely that is all just physics? Actually, that is only partially true: this subject is chock-full of chemistry. An entertaining, opinionated, and well-written general introduction, Sticking Together turned out to be educational in more than one way.

(more…)

Book review – The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate

7-minute read

Since it was coined in the year 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, the term “Anthropocene” has taken the world by storm – pretty much in the same way as the phenomenon it describes. Humanity’s impact on the planet has become so all-encompassing that it warrants giving this period a new name. As a colloquial term that is all snazzy, but are we actually leaving a tangible trace in the rock record to signal a transition to a new period?

(more…)

Book review – Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption

Fossils fuels have powered civilization since the Industrial Revolution, and their consumption has exploded in the last few decades. But for all the prosperity that coal, gas, and oil have brought, there are many downsides, not least amongst these climate change. So how did we get here? Usual explanations point at individual consumption and population growth, and I would be quick to agree. With Burning Up, Simon Pirani, a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, basically says “not so quick, things are not that simple” and provides a deeply researched history of fossil fuel consumption.

(more…)

Book review – The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

Human civilisation is hungry for many resources, and I feel that there is a general awareness that we are taking more than the planet can provide. Deforestation, overfishing, fossil fuel exploitation – I’d like to think these are all familiar concepts. But who knew that we have a sand crisis looming in our near future? Journalist Vince Beiser has written a hard-hitting reportage that convinces that, despite its ubiquity, even humble grains of sand are a finite resource.

(more…)