"The whole world is going too fast," an Inuit hunter from Banks Island in the Northwest Territories in Canada told the journalist Elizabeth Kolbert at a bar during a global-warming symposium. A few years before, he and his neighbors had started seeing robins, birds they had no name for. At first the milder weather that drew the robins north seemed a good thing -- "warmer winters, you know," he said -- but as other changes occurred that affected their traditional way of life, including hunting, it did not seem so good. "Our children may not have a future," the hunter concluded. "I mean, all young people, put it that way. It's not just happening in the Arctic. It's going to happen all over the world."
For Field Notes From a Catastrophe, Kolbert went not exactly all over the world to find out what's happening with global warming but to a great many places in it, and she often heard the same elegiac expressions of foreboding, loss and fear for the next generation. In Shishmaref, Alaska, she met people who were abandoning their tiny island home because, with less sea ice around it as a buffer against storms, their houses and land were being carried away. ("It makes me feel lonely," one woman said of the forced move.) In Iceland, a man monitoring glacial advance and retreat passed on the prediction that by the end of the next century, his country, where glaciers have existed for more than 2 million years, will be essentially ice-free. On the Greenland ice cap, well away from the coast, researchers gathering meteorological data were surprised to see melt "in areas where liquid water had not been seen for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years."
And so it went in Fairbanks, Alaska, Yorkshire, Eugene and Oregon. "Such is the impact of global warming," Kolbert points out, that she could have gone to countless other places, "from Siberia to the Austrian Alps to the Great Barrier Reef to the South African fynbos -- to document its effects."
Kolbert, a former reporter for The New York Times, doesn't doubt that human-induced global warming is real and will likely have dire consequences; the title of her book includes the word "catastrophe." The pages are replete with bad news: perennial sea ice, which 25 years ago covered an area of the Arctic the size of the continental US, has since lost an area "the size of New York, Georgia and Texas combined." Carbon dioxide levels, if emissions go unchecked, could reach three times pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
Based on a series of articles that appeared in The New Yorker magazine, the book is organized around notes Kolbert took on "field trips," not only to places where climate change is affecting the natural world but also to ones -- labs, offices, observatories -- where humans are trying to understand the pheno-menon of human-induced global warming. Hers is the latest in a large crop of books on the subject -- she notes that "entire books have been written just on the history of efforts to draw attention to the problem" -- and there are inevitably some places where other authors have trod before.
In language that is clear, if somewhat dry, she examines the major pieces of the story, shedding light on some insider concepts of climatologists, like "dangerous anthropogenic interference," as she goes. The book may make a good handbook as it is both comprehensive and succinct. (If you have ever wondered how a climate model is put together, that's in there, too.)
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