Elizabeth Kolbert chronicles the true
face of what so many refuse to believe to be real: Global Climate
change. Far from being alarmist, she carefully assembles eye witness
experts and scientific papers to such disparate topics as species
migration, toad species extinction, ice sheet core analysis, and ice
flow consistencies from all over the globe. It's as careful as her
journalism and as sourced as a dissertation and rightly so, since it
springs from the series of articles she wrote for the New Yorker on
the subject.
The work isn't new and it isn't hidden, this is what has been available to all of us for quite some time. The earth is warming and the human contributions are no longer deniable. There are things that can be done, if only we are willing.
A truly striking theme in the book is the notice that scientists are being characterized as alarmist and extremist. When have scientists ever fit that bill? When have they thrown the scientific method to the wind and gone on the vagaries of belief as a crux of argument? They have not ever done that and they aren't now. As a group they agree on the principle elements - the earth is warming, humans contribute to that, and it's going to be a major and drastic change that no one is sure whether we can survive - provided nothing is done to stop it.
Never before have we been so threatened by simple profit motive. But who is out there to actually discredit science? Kolbert takes us carefully through the science and also through the opponents of the science to show that there is no real benefit in lying about the warming, but there is profit in denying it.
It's a valuable book, with beautiful material and illustrations. It's also a sad book which shouldn't be read by anyone who has already lost hope.
- CV Rick
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