“Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change” by Elizabeth Kolbert (185 short, easy, painful pages).

Book Review by Jonathan Katz

Al Gore’s picture book ("An Inconvenient Truth") is global warming lite. Kolbert’s short, crisp, poetic explanation, some of which first appeared as a collection of essays in The New Yorker, gets you what looks very much like the real story. In two words, we’re fucked. Carefully researched, relying heavily on material published in top journals like “Science” and interviews on the scene with climate researchers, she lays out the case: current changes (in the Arctic “it’s moving very, very fast”); science of greenhouse gas increase and climate modeling; projected scenarios for collapse of ice caps, ocean conveyor, coastline and beyond flooding; drought in America, and the consequences of one or more years of real, prolonged drought (when the land dries, nothing grows and the people die and leave and their civilization collapses); BAU –the consequences of “business as usual” and the likelihood that it will continue; all the good work Burlington, Vermont has done; how the coal plants China is building between now and 2020 will totally wipe out all of Burlington’s good work, past and future, in 3 hours of operation; what Earth needs to do to hold CO2 emissions at current levels (basically, everything conservation on an unimaginable scale, solar panels the size of Connecticut, a million two-megawatt wind turbines, double the generating capacity of all 441 existing nuclear power reactors, double efficiency of every car (one so-called “stabilization wedge”) and drive them half as much (another wedge), and things we can’t do commercially now like carbon capture and storage--liquefy CO2 and inject it deep underground. All this conservation and energy substituting is split neatly into 1 gigaton-per-year “stabilization wedges” by a top climate scientist, and we need to implement—actually do—at least seven of them just to hold the line. We are students of human nature and we all know this will never happen before atmospheric CO2 goes well past 500 parts per million and beyond, well beyond any rational threshold for “dangerous anthropomorphic interference” or DAI.

We will be discovered by aliens, aeons from now, as another failed species that could not handle the transition between subsistence agriculture and high tech. The universe teems with life. Some of it is sentient. Some of the sentient species kill themselves in nuclear fireballs and others gag on their own smog and still others destabilize their climates and their planet does itself a favor and kills them off.

So, I boldly predict. Make no mistake: humankind will survive. Great civilizations will arise in unheard-of places like Siberia, soon to be fertile and heated to a balmy 80 degrees (but not before it spews off all the CO2 contained in all the dead organic matter frozen now in the permafrost). But the new civilizations won’t act like us. They will have The Knowledge and they will use it to live in balance with their reshaped planet, to survive and grow and prosper. But first there is going to be one hell of a die-off, and us and our kids and their kids are going to be the ones doing the dying.

Jonathan Katz jkatz@jacobslaw.com

Link to book at Amazon

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