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Useless Arithmetic

Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future

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Useless Arithmetic

By: Orrin Pilkey, Linda Pilkey-Jarvis
Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
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About this listen

 This book shows that the quantitative mathematical models policy makers and government administrators use to form environmental policies are seriously flawed. Based on unrealistic and sometimes false assumptions, these models often yield answers that support unwise policies.

Writing for the general, nonmathematician reader, the authors begin with a riveting account of the extinction of the North Atlantic cod on the Grand Banks of Canada.

The book offers fascinating case studies depicting how the seductiveness of quantitative models has led to unmanageable nuclear waste-disposal practices, poisoned mining sites, unjustifiable faith in predicted sea level rise rates, bad predictions of future shoreline erosion rates, over-optimistic cost estimates of artificial beaches, and a host of other thorny problems.

©2007 Columbia University Press (P)2008 Audible, Inc. Ecology Environment Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Politics & Government Science Conservation Polar Region Mining Ecosystem

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Critic reviews

"This is an easy and persuasive read." (New Scientist)
"This book is a welcome antidote to the blind use of supposedly quantitative models." (American Scientist)
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