This was a really interesting book. I thought it would just be about weather, which it kind of was, but it was also about the implications of removing weather data as a governmental data source and privatizing it. I hadn't really given that much thought, but WHOA do I think it's a bad idea after reading this book.
One of my favorite weather websites is Accuweather, but after reading this book and hearing some of the things the head of Accuweather wants to do, I am slowly shifting my weather-nerdiness away from Accuweather as I research more and more on the validity of the claims of the book. (This isn't the first time a book has caused my consumer habits to change - The Wal-Mart Effect had a profound influence in my shopping habits.) Aside from weather, it was a study on how powerful data is, why people want it, what amazing things the public can accomplish from access to data, and how it is changing our world. While this book did slam Accuweather pretty hard, it also gave a fair amount of details regarding Kathryn Sullivan, the former head of NOAA and first woman to walk in space which I found fascinating!
There was a really interesting part about how data on the farmlands in the USA has been used to help aid farmers in how they plant their crops.
The main complaint I had about the book is it ended fairly abruptly. I really wanted more information about a lot of the subjects included in the book, but I understand it was meant to be a fairly high level book warning of the dangers of removing data from the public eye, so to dig deep would have lost a lot of readers. Overall though, like I started this review with, really interesting book.
This book was only on Audible, which bums me out because I couldn't mark down the pages, but I have read he has a book out called "The Fifth Risk" that contains a lot of the information that I will add to my ever growing to be read list.
2 hrs 27 mins
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