Orrin H. Pilkey is an emeritus professor of geology whose work critically assesses environmental modeling. Pilkey's writing focuses on scientific insights while sharply critiquing the methods used to predict environmental change. He leverages his expertise in geology and coastal studies to illuminate complex environmental issues. His publications examine the perils of relying on mathematical models, emphasizing the need for critical thinking in environmental science.
Travelling from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to South America and the eastern United States, the authors of Vanishing Sands track the devastating environmental, social, and economic impact of legal and illegal sand mining over the past twenty years.
Acknowledging the impending worldwide catastrophe of rising seas in the twenty-first century, Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey outline the impacts on the United States' shoreline and argue that the only feasible response along much of the U.S. shoreline is an immediate and managed retreat.
This big-picture, policy-oriented book explains in gripping terms what rising oceans will do to coastal cities and the drastic actions we need to take now to remove vulnerable populations. The authors detail effective approaches for addressing climate-change denialism and powerful arguments for changing U.S. federal coastal-management policies.
This title tells how beaches work, explains why they vary so much, and shows how dramatic changes can occur on them in a matter of hours. It discusses tides, waves, and wind; the patterns of dunes, washover fans, and wrack lines; and the shape of berms, bars, shell lags, cusps, ripples, and blisters.
Writing for the general, nonmathematician reader and using examples from throughout the environmental sciences, Orrin Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis show how unquestioned faith in mathematical models can blind us to the hard data and sound judgment of experienced scientific fieldwork. They begin with the extinction of the North Atlantic cod on the Grand Banks of Canada, and then they discuss the limitations of many models across a broad array of crucial environmental subjects. Case studies depict 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, overoptimistic cost estimates of artificial beaches, and a host of other problems. The authors demonstrate how many modelers have been reckless, employing fudge factors to assure "correct" answers and caring little if their models actually worked.