About book Field Notes From A Catastrophe: Man, Nature, And Climate Change (2006)
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got LickedThat famous quote from Upton Sinclair seems highly appropriate to any discussion of climate change in this country. Entrenched, very powerful economic interests control our political system and, to a great extent, our media, and those interests are determined that business as usual shall prevail in the production and distribution of energy. In other words, petrochemical companies should be allowed to operate unchecked and unregulated. That this is a recipe for worldwide catastrophe is made quite clear in this slim book by science writer Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert organizes her narrative as a series of travelogues to various parts of the world where the effects of global warming are made most evident. And so we visit the Alaskan interior, Iceland, and the Greenland ice sheet, as well as the mountains and meadows of Britain and Europe and the jungles of Costa Rica. We also get to meet the researchers in all these places who are working hard to understand the effects of a warming climate.Kolbert also takes us back to the beginning of the study of climate and climate change in the 19th century where we meet Irish physicist John Tyndall who studied the absorptive properties of various gases and came up with the first accurate account of how the atmosphere functions.We also meet Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who picked up where Tyndall left off and who later would win the Nobel Prize for his work on electrolytic dissociation. Arrhenius became curious about the effects of carbon dioxide on global temperatures. He was apparently interested in whether falling levels of carbon dioxide might have caused the ice ages. He calculated how the earth's temperature would be affected by changing carbon dioxide levels. He was able to declare that rising levels of carbon dioxide would allow future generations "to live under a warmer sky."Kolbert reviews some of the cultures that have suffered from or been destroyed by climate change in the past - for example, the classical Mayan civilization of the Yucatan and, even earlier, that of Akkad between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.This is all fascinating stuff for those of us who are interested in this issue, an audience which should include the entire human race. The information is presented in a comprehensive and succinct manner and in highly readable form. Kolbert has a knack for making complicated topics understandable. The book was first published in 2006 in the middle of the George W. Bush presidency and one of the saddest chapters of the book is entitled "The Day After Kyoto" which begins with a conversation with Bush's Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, Paula Dobriansky. Dobriansky attempts to explain and defend the adminstration's policy on climate change. What she actually does is repeat the same talking point over and over again.Indeed, the history of the United States' handling of the problem of global warming has been mostly downhill since President George H.W. Bush acknowledged the problem and signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It has mostly been a history of denial of basic science and a refusal to act or to lead, as perhaps best exemplified by climate change denialist Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma.In an afterword written in January 2009, Kolbert makes clear that business as usual continues and without U.S. leadership the problem of climate change cannot be solved. It seems unlikely that that will happen in the foreseeable future. The warnings of scientists like James Hansen continue to go unheeded and Earth continues to heat up. I finished this book feeling very depressed about the future prospects for survival of the human race.
This is a really good primer on climate change, the perfect gift for your conservative uncle who thinks climate change is a liberal conspiracy. Although he wouldn’t read it, which is why so many people still ignore this crucial issue: they don’t care about science and reality. Published in 2006, I was struck over and over again by how little we have done to address climate change since this book came out. It’s depressing is that some things are still the same. James Inhoffe, for example, is featured in this book, quoting Michael Chricton in defense of his climate change denial, calling climate change “the greatest hoax every perpetrated on the American people.” Today, idiots argue from the Senate floor, holding snowballs, that climate change isn’t real. However, even though the Bush administration was terrible in terms of taking on climate change, at least they acknowledged it was real, where now an entire major political party has colluded to pretend it all isn’t happening.Kolbert takes a broad view of climate change, tackling it from a variety of perspectives through a field notes approach. I won’t summarize them, but it’s impressive how many perspectives she’s able to incorporate into such a short and readable book. It’s well-written, conscientious and cautionary, a book everyone who cares about our planet should read.The only negative thing I found in this book is Kolbert’s habit of introducing a new climate scientist or academic and immediately describing their eyes, their noses, etc., comparing them to some other famous person in some way. After the third or fourth instance, it started to get really old and formulaic, but luckily skippable. Other than that, this book is phenomenal. I just wish it were fiction and not reality.
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I believe that one of (if not the) hot topic of the 2008 presidential election will be global warming (no pun intended...okay, a little pun was intended!). It is vitally important that voters realize the actuality of global climate change as it pertains to sea level rise, increasing temperatures, hurricanes, and rainfall. This is a book that explains some of these phenomenons on a level that is understandable to the majority of the general public. Ms. Kolbert is not a scientist, her background is in staff writing for the New York times and The New Yorker so she has a wonderful ability to express scientific views in a clear-cut and understandable manner. If you are interested in learning more about climate change (and everyone should be seeing as it will effect everyone) then I recommend picking this book up!I gave it a slightly lower rating because, as a scientist, there wasn't much new information in it for me. However, it was an entertaining book and kept me reading throughout the entire thing! Look for more books that I will be reading regarding this topic...
—Nicole
This book seems poorly-proportioned. It spends too many pages shoring up the existence of anthropogenic climate change and not enough time talking about the implications. Anyone open to the scientific premise isn't going to need 100 pages of proof before getting into the interesting part. Between assessments of the present and forecasts for the future, Kolbert also never pauses to explain exactly why this is a problem. I'm not a climate change skeptic by any means, but my biggest frustration is people who don't lay out the argument for why changing the earth at a geological level is either morally or practically unacceptable. Is it because it will dislocate coastal communities? Because it will wipe out animal species that are important to the ecosystem? Because it will lead to the extinction of man? Any or all of these might be true, but I'd like for people not to just take the catastrophic nature of global warming as an article of faith and tell me so. The most interesting takeaway from this book is that there are a number of positive feedback cycles and trigger points that make the natural human tendency to think of global warming as a steady, linear process very dangerous. Kolbert makes a thorough case for why stored carbon in permafrost, the ice-albedo feedback loop, and other things will make the effects of global warming far more irregular and sudden than we appreciate.
—Noah
This is something of a miracle of concision--it is scientifically literate and helps to provide a more secure foundation for many of the well-known generalizations about the causes and implications of anthropogenic climate change. I especially appreciated the brief forays into computer modelling and other scientific methods profiled in the book: we spend a few days with Vladimir Romanovsky, geophysicist and one of the world's leading permafrost experts; we read about John Tyndall , who in 1859 built the worlds first spectrophotometer , and who first analyzed the natural greenhouse effect; Svante Arrhenius, who in the 1890s made the first (surprisingly accurate) predictions of what would happen to global temperatures if Co2 were doubled; paleoclimatologists Peter DeMenocal and Harvey Weiss, whose work with ocean sediments ice cores and archeologocial excavations increasingly point to climate related factors in the collapse of ancient civilizations; the work of biologists studying trees , butterflies, mosquitoes and toads in order to assess their phenotypic plasticity; and the serious debate between engineer Robert Socolow and physicist Marty Hoffert about the future trajectory of CO2 emissions provides the actual parameters of serious intellectual disagreement --though hardly enough to justify the ridiculous amount of climate change skepticism still infecting the public sphere.I especially liked the descriptions of less mobile species are likely to be rendered extinct by rapid climate change, as well as the enormous costs visited upon human populations -- and the useful chronology in the back of relevant developments in the "anthropocene epoch" since the steam engine was invented in 1769. (Sobering to realize that when I was born, CO2 was 315 parts per million--and is now 380, not to mention the amount methane which has nearly doubled and looks set to increase enormously with the melting of the permafrost.) There is a great description in the first chapter of why so much methane is in the permafrost, and how the loss of permafrost is affecting people who live in the North.The book ends with a reflection on Hurricane Katrina (it was written in 2006 but anticipates 2012's Hurricane Sandy)
—Mark Crawford
