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I read this book for my history class and surprisingly I found this book very interesting; easy read and too the point.
I read another chapter and I ponder the futility of living for the next thirty years. I know some think semi-lightweight essay-style nonfiction like this book is 'bad for you' - that a textbook packed with hard science and no prose is the order of the day. The writing is fluid and compelling; the author's eye for the tiny moment, as well as the big picture, is acute; and even though the information is, at this point, almost 4 years old, it is, of course, as urgent as ever.I have a caveat, though. I read a chapter and I have bad dreams. Do something. None of us like to have global warming staring us in the face, much less voluntarily reading a paperback about it.
Make plans to do something proactive and positive each time you pick up this work. I disagree, for the fundamental reason that if one book like this one gets in the hands of one person reading it idly in the airport or in a coffee shop, and it creates enough of an impression to cause that person to make some change, then it's done it's job. So my caveat is this: read at your own peril. We investigate further because we want to know the truth - and the truth is, as I said above, monumentally depressing. This book is flat-out depressing. Don't just dwell on the facts as laid out before us.
I know, I know, we're bombarded with exhortations at a constant rate - buy a car with better mileage, recycle your pizza boxes, hug a tree - but it truly is up to us to consider the consequences.
The weakness of the book is the lack of pictures and colour graphics to complement the excellent writing. The feedbacks that have been identified in the climate system - the ice-albedo feedback, the water vapour feedback, the feedback between temperatures and carbon storage in the permafrost - take small changes to the system and amplify them into much larger forces. An excellent, brief, readable summary of the evidence for global warming, its scientific explanation, its consequences and the sorry history of our leaders' response to the problem over the last thirty years. During that period, humans who were, genetically speaking, just like ourselves produced nothing permanent other than isolated cave paintings and large piles of mastodon bones. Will we find an adequate global response to global warming or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self interest. Let us hope that the next edition will remedy this and bring the book to a wider audience. These developments would not have been possible without human ingenuity, but, until the climate cooperated, ingenuity, it seems, wasn't enough.' 'Ice core records also show that the earth will soon be hotter than it has been at any time since our species evolved.
With six billion people, the risks are everywhere apparent. The anecdotes and character sketches of the scientists involved bring the issues to life. Perhaps the most unpredictable feedback of all is the human one. Paraphrasing the last two paragraphs of the book to show its excellence: 'Ice cores show the last glaciation was a time of frequent and traumatic climate swings. Then, 10,000 years ago the climate settled down and so did we, building towns and inventing agriculture, metallurgy, writing and the other technologies that future civilisation would rely upon. A disruption in monsoon patters, a shift in ocean currents, a major drought - any one of these could easily produce millions of refugees. It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.' Read the whole book for the compelling story behind this message.
The otherwise excellent Bill Bryson comes to mind here.By telling the story of climate change from the field rather than a general context the information is easier to assimilate because it has a human face.Refreshingly the author does not spill to much ink on the subject of the opportunist criminal greed heads, who against all scientific evidence, tried to discredited the study of climate change for so long. I recommend this book to any casual reader who needs an introduction to the nature and scope of the environmental catastrophe we are experiencing. The transnational corporations and their political servants are past masters at this and such behavior was expected (the issues of tobacco,leaded petrol and CFCs come to mind). It is less densely informative and grindingly depressing than Tim Flannery"s 'The Weather Makers' which is the best book I have read so far on the subject of climate change.It puts a human face on the problem without sacrificing the breadth of the problem or its grave nature. More journalistic in approach than many comparable books the author does not fall into the trap of the sensational statistic and goshwowism that besets many laypersons writing popular science. So I urge you to read this book. It offers no solutions (because there aren't any)but gives you a human and lucid exposition of the problems that beset us.
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate ChangeWe fire our concerns about climate change thinking that we will not have to deal with the effectos of the global warming. Elizabeth Kolbert does not permit you to lie yourself. The picture of the climate change that is already here and the effects that it might have on us, not on our sons and nephews is so vivid that my plunge you in depression. You should read it, unless you want to act like the boiling frog.
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