Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

Covers a lot of scientists in various fields tackling climate change, the political side, the social aspects, and the terminology is explained well for the layman. great book!

Earlier this year I read The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery. It was an excellent book full of scientific explanations to nearly all the questions I had about the issue of climate change. Now I have just finished Field Notes From a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert. It also is an excellent book. In fact, I wish I had read it first - not because it is the better of the two books, but because it is a better introduction to the subject. Field Notes From A Catastrophe details the author's experiences as she traveled, met, and conversed with several leading authorities of the climate change issue. The first chapters explain some of the negative effects of climate change on nature, while the later chapters deal with how climate change has affected man and civilization in the past, how it will likely affect us in the future, and how political leaders are squandering the last few years we have left to make much of difference - all in order to appease their big-time cash contributors. The author excels in letting experts in the field tell the story for her. For example, in explaining the devastating consequence of modest, but prolonged, local climate change to an ancient middle-eastern civilization the leading paleo-climatologist to study the case says, "The thing they couldn't prepare for was the same thing that we won't prepare for, because in their case they didn't know about it and because in our case the political system can't listen to it. And that is that the climate system has much greater things in store for us than we think." I highly recommend this book. For more advanced scientific information about climate change many other good books are available (including The Weather Makers), but for an introduction to the subject this one is nearly perfect.

While many people want to argue if the present Global Warming is being caused by our fossil fuel emissions, the simple fact is that things are changing in the global climate. When one reviews past histories of various civilizations, it turns out that drought and lack of rainfall really killed some expanding human habitation systems. Then the survivors shrink back to more primitive times, and leave their ruins behind. All this before the petroleum culture and Henry Ford. What I like about this book, is the reporter's exchanges with true scientists, who spend all their professional lives documenting SOMETHING on the face of this earth. Our concern with the environment has been all too much to do with leisure instead of heavy natural science knowlege. Those immersed in such serious work seldom get the attention that this author gave to them; more of that should occur! I am buying this book as a graduation present for my nephew who possibly could be spending the next fifty years of his life on these issues affecting this present USA civilization.

There are so many different ways Humanity is warned against coming catastrophe that it becomes difficult sometimes to know what to fear first. For most of my lifetime the possiblity of Nuclear War between the United States and the Soviet Union was considered the greatest danger. Since the end of the Cold War that particular danger has passed, though the nuclear proliferation threat especially with Iran pressing for nuclear weapons, has certainly not left us. Other kinds of natural and unnatural disaster are , according to various experts on, or not on, the way. There have been mass -animal dieouts on the planet before and who knows when some surprising visitor from the deep distance may open up a crater larger than Yucatan. Martin Rees has perhaps more than anyone else chronicled in a scientifically credible way the variety of possible candidates for doing away with us. These of course include our own experimental work in nanotechnology and sub- atomic particle investigation. Elizabeth Kolbert focuses on one of the most credible threats to our future on this planet, global- warming. She makes a kind of global tour of places already effected by the rise in temperature. From Alaska where she speaks with a group of Eskimos who have literally lost their world, to Holland where there is a concern that the great part of the landmass may disappear in the centuries ahead , she collects data and personal stories which highlight the danger. Her own heat however is specially concentrated on U.S. policy in this area, and especially the decision not to ratify the Kyoto accord. Kolbert also is greatly concerned with the growing Chinese and Indian economies which too promise in the decades ahead to vastly increase the amount of carbon dioxide they put in the atmosphere. She, it seems to me, makes a very strong case for global warming. It is bolstered in my own mind by my own sense that past years have been considerably warmer, than the colder times of my childhood. But of course this is just personal impression and not solid evidence. Global-warming skeptics will say that this is all alarmist, that in much longer time- framework the kinds of temperature variations we are talking about are not significant. They will argue that 'natural events and processes' have far greater influence on the world , than human actions in the so- called 'Anthropocene'. My own best guess here is that there is danger, that we are warming the planet up, and threatening our own future. However my sense is also that the 'catastrophe' if it comes may be much farther away than Kolbert would have us believe. I do not really know. What Kolbert has done however in this book is show that there are already many people for whom the negative effects of global - warming are already very real.

One never ceases to marvel at the consistent way in which we humans seem to be lunging headlong into the ecological abyss. In this wonderful new book by former New York Times reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, the reader is whisked away into a series of field trips into the myriad of places across the globe where the increasing evidence of approaching disaster is being observed, discussed, and reacted to in ways that has to give the reader pause. Eskimos are abandoning a small island in the Artic Ocean even as the surrounding ice cap that once protected from wind and storm damage melts into oblivion as a direct result of the Greenhouse Effect. Kolbert offer us poignant glimpses at humans forced to confront ugly truths about the nature of the Anthropocene era, that is, that so-far limited expanse of time that humans have inhabited the earth. Presented with the bulk of the evidence, it is hard for an objective intellect to escape the distinct possibility that as a species we seem to be hell-bent on self-destruction. Indeed, the breadth and scope of the manifest effects of climate change on human habitation is breath-taking, affecting societies as far-flung as Netherlands to Siberia, from South Africa to the Great Barrier Reef. She writes wryly about stepping through the looking glass in a conversation with a Washington wonk who attempted to justify the Bush administration's active opposition to both the Kyoto Treaty and any attempt to rework it into a manageable tool to effectively combat the effects of global warming. It is in such encounters that she discovers her voice and her poignant sense of urgency; if the best educated among us choose to stand in active opposition, what chance is thereto turn this catastrophic change in climate around? Furthermore, in interviewing climate specialists, we discover that the environment is moving rapidly toward disaster, and while there are reasons to hope, there is also reason to view our inaction and our opposition to meaningful global action with alarm. As the former Third World countries like India and China become both more industrial and more consumptive societies, the environment's ability to overcome the cumulative injuries to the earth's biosphere becomes even more difficult to imagine. This book is an easy read, is quite informative, delivered in a reporter's style of succinct and yet comprehensive prose. It does yeoman's service in informing citizens of just how dangerous and calamitous this developing ecological, social, and economic catastrophe truly is. This is a great book, and one I can heartily recommend. Enjoy!