[Kabar-indonesia] 1 of 2: NYRB: The Threat to the Planet - by Director of NASA Goddard Institute

[Joyo at aol.com]

-1 of 2-

Note: 2 of 2 includes: Religion from the Outside
By Freeman J. Dyson

The New York Review of Books
Volume 53, Number 12 / July 13, 2006

Review

The Threat to the Planet

By Jim Hansen [Director of the NASA Goddard Institute
for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor of Earth and
Environmental Sciences at Columbia University's Earth
Institute. His opinions are expressed here, he writes,
"as personal views under the protection of the First
Amendment of the United States Constitution."]

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate
 and What It Means for Life on Earth
by Tim Flannery
Atlantic Monthly Press, 357 pp., $24.00

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and
 Climate Change
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Bloomsbury, 210 pp., $22.95

An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of
Global Warming and What We Can Do About It
by Al Gore
Melcher Media/Rodale, 325 pp., $21.95 (paper)

An Inconvenient Truth
a film directed by Davis Guggenheim

1.

Animals are on the run. Plants are migrating too. The
Earth's creatures, save for one species, do not have
thermostats in their living rooms that they can adjust
for an optimum environment. Animals and plants are
adapted to specific climate zones, and they can
survive only when they are in those zones. Indeed,
scientists often define climate zones by the
vegetation and animal life that they support.
Gardeners and bird watchers are well aware of this,
and their handbooks contain maps of the zones in which
a tree or flower can survive and the range of each
bird species.

Those maps will have to be redrawn. Most people,
mainly aware of larger day-to-day fluctuations in the
weather, barely notice that climate, the average
weather, is changing. In the 1980s I started to use
colored dice that I hoped would help people understand
global warming at an early stage. Of the six sides of
the dice only two sides were red, or hot, representing
the probability of having an unusually warm season
during the years between 1951 and 1980. By the first
decade of the twenty-first century, four sides were
red. Just such an increase in the frequency of
unusually warm seasons, in fact, has occurred. But
most people -who have other things on their minds and
can use thermostats-have taken little notice.

Animals have no choice, since their survival is at
stake. Recently after appearing on television to
discuss climate change, I received an e-mail from a
man in northeast Arkansas: "I enjoyed your report on
Sixty Minutes and commend your strength. I would like
to tell you of an observation I have made. It is the
armadillo. I had not seen one of these animals my
entire life, until the last ten years. I drive the
same forty-mile trip on the same road every day and
have slowly watched these critters advance further
north every year and they are not stopping. Every year
they move several miles."

Armadillos appear to be pretty tough. Their mobility
suggests that they have a good chance to keep up with
the movement of their climate zone, and to be one of
the surviving species. Of course, as they reach the
city limits of St. Louis and Chicago, they may not be
welcome. And their ingenuity may be taxed as they seek
ways to ford rivers and multiple-lane highways.

Problems are greater for other species, as Tim
Flannery, a well-known Australian mammalogist and
conservationist, makes clear in The Weather Makers.
Ecosystems are based on interdependencies-between, for
example, flower and pollinator, hunter and hunted,
grazers and plant life-so the less mobile species have
an impact on the survival of others. Of course climate
fluctuated in the past, yet species adapted and
flourished. But now the rate of climate change driven
by human activity is reaching a level that dwarfs
natural rates of change. And barriers created by human
beings, such as urban sprawl and homogeneous
agricultural fields, block many migration routes. If
climate change is too great, natural barriers, such as
coastlines, spell doom for some species.

Studies of more than one thousand species of plants,
animals, and insects, including butterfly ranges
charted by members of the public, found an average
migration rate toward the North and South Poles of
about four miles per decade in the second half of the
twentieth century. That is not fast enough. During the
past thirty years the lines marking the regions in
which a given average temperature prevails
("isotherms") have been moving poleward at a rate of
about thirty-five miles per decade. That is the size
of a county in Iowa. Each decade the range of a given
species is moving one row of counties northward.

As long as the total movement of isotherms toward the
poles is much smaller than the size of the habitat, or
the ranges in which the animals live, the effect on
species is limited. But now the movement is inexorably
toward the poles and totals more than a hundred miles
over the past several decades. If emissions of
greenhouse gases continue to increase at the current
rate-"business as usual"-then the rate of isotherm
movement will double in this century to at least
seventy miles per decade. If we continue on this path,
a large fraction of the species on Earth, as many as
50 percent or more, may become extinct.

The species most at risk are those in polar climates
and the biologically diverse slopes of alpine regions.
Polar animals, in effect, will be pushed off the
planet. Alpine species will be pushed toward higher
altitudes, and toward smaller, rockier areas with
thinner air; thus, in effect, they will also be pushed
off the planet. A few such species, such as polar
bears, no doubt will be "rescued" by human beings, but
survival in zoos or managed animal reserves will be
small consolation to bears or nature lovers.

In the Earth's history, during periods when average
global temperatures increased by as much as ten
degrees Fahrenheit, there have been several "mass
extinctions," when between 50 and 90 percent of the
species on Earth disappeared forever. In each case,
life survived and new species developed over hundreds
of thousands of years. The most recent of these mass
extinctions defines the boundary, 55 million years
ago, between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs. The
evolutionary turmoil associated with that climate
change gave rise to a host of modern mammals, from
rodents to primates, which appear in fossil records
for the first time in the early Eocene.

If human beings follow a business-as-usual course,
continuing to exploit fossil fuel resources without
reducing carbon emissions or capturing and
sequestering them before they warm the atmosphere, the
eventual effects on climate and life may be comparable
to those at the time of mass extinctions. Life will
survive, but it will do so on a transformed planet.
For all foreseeable human generations, it will be a
far more desolate world than the one in which
civilization developed and flourished during the past
several thousand years.

2.

The greatest threat of climate change for human
beings, I believe, lies in the potential
destabilization of the massive ice sheets in Greenland
and Antarctica. As with the extinction of species, the
disintegration of ice sheets is irreversible for
practical purposes. Our children, grandchildren, and
many more generations will bear the consequences of
choices that we make in the next few years.

The level of the sea throughout the globe is a
reflection primarily of changes in the volume of ice
sheets and thus of changes of global temperature. When
the planet cools, ice sheets grow on continents and
the sea level falls. Conversely, when the Earth warms,
ice melts and the sea level rises. In Field Notes from
a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert reports on the work
of researchers trying to understand the acceleration
of melting, and in his new book and film An
Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore graphically illustrates
possible effects of a rising sea level on Florida and
other locations.

Ice sheets waxed and waned as the Earth cooled and
warmed over the past 500,000 years. During the coldest
ice ages, the Earth's average temperature was about
ten degrees Fahrenheit colder than today. So much
water was locked in the largest ice sheet, more than a
mile thick and covering most of Canada and northern
parts of the United States, that the sea level was 400
feet lower than today. The warmest interglacial
periods were about two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than
today and the sea level was as much as sixteen feet
higher.

Future rise in the sea level will depend,
dramatically, on the increase in greenhouse gases,
which will largely determine the amount of global

warming. As described in the books under review,
sunlight enters the atmosphere and warms the Earth,
and then is sent back into space as heat radiation.
Greenhouse gases trap this heat in the atmosphere and
thereby warm the Earth's surface as we are warmed when
blankets are piled on our bed. Carbon dioxide (CO2),
produced mainly by burning fossil fuels (coal, oil,
and gas), is the most important greenhouse gas made by
human beings. Methane (CH4), which is "natural gas"
that escapes to the atmosphere from coal mines, oil
wells, rice paddies, landfills, and animal feedlots,
is also an important greenhouse gas. Other significant
warming agents are ground-level ozone and black soot,
which arise mainly from incomplete combustion of
fossil fuels and biofuels.

In order to arrive at an effective policy we can
project two different scenarios concerning climate
change. In the business-as-usual scenario, annual
emissions of CO2 continue to increase at the current
rate for at least fifty years, as do non-CO2 warming
agents including methane, ozone, and black soot. In
the alternative scenario, CO2 emissions level off this
decade, slowly decline for a few decades, and by
mid-century decrease rapidly, aided by new
technologies.

The business-as-usual scenario yields an increase of
about five degrees Fahrenheit of global warming during
this century, while the alternative scenario yields an
increase of less than two degrees Fahrenheit during
the same period. Warming can be predicted accurately
based on knowledge of how Earth responded to similar
levels of greenhouse gases in the past. (By drilling
into glaciers to analyze air bubbles trapped under
layers of snow, scientists can measure the levels of
each gas in the atmosphere hundreds of thousands of
years ago. By comparing the concentrations of
different isotopes of oxygen in these air bubbles,
they can measure the average temperature of past
centuries.) Climate models by themselves yield similar
answers. However, the evidence from the Earth's
history provides a more precise and sensitive measure,
and we know that the real world accurately included
the effects of all feedback processes, such as changes
of clouds and water vapor, that have an effect on
temperature.

How much will sea level rise with five degrees of
global warming? Here too, our best information comes
from the Earth's history. The last time that the Earth
was five degrees warmer was three million years ago,
when sea level was about eighty feet higher. 

Eighty feet! In that case, the United States would
lose most East Coast cities: Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Washington, and Miami; indeed,
practically the entire state of Florida would be under
water. Fifty million people in the US live below that
sea level. Other places would fare worse. China would
have 250 million displaced persons. Bangladesh would
produce 120 million refugees, practically the entire
nation. India would lose the land of 150 million
people.

A rise in sea level, necessarily, begins slowly.
Massive ice sheets must be softened and weakened
before rapid disintegration and melting occurs and the
sea level rises. It may require as much as a few
centuries to produce most of the long-term response.
But the inertia of ice sheets is not our ally against
the effects of global warming. The Earth's history
reveals cases in which sea level, once ice sheets
began to collapse, rose one meter (1.1 yards) every
twenty years for centuries. That would be a calamity
for hundreds of cities around the world, most of them
far larger than New Orleans. Devastation from a rising
sea occurs as the result of local storms which can be
expected to cause repeated retreats from transitory
shorelines and rebuilding away from them.

Satellite images and other data have revealed the
initial response of ice sheets to global warming. The
area on Greenland in which summer melting of ice took
place increased more than 50 percent during the last
twenty-five years. Meltwater descends through
crevasses to the ice sheet base, where it provides
lubrication that increases the movement of the ice
sheet and the discharge of giant icebergs into the
ocean. The volume of icebergs from Greenland has
doubled in the last ten years. Seismic stations reveal
a shocking increase in "icequakes" on Greenland,
caused by a portion of an ice sheet lurching forward
and grinding to a halt. The annual number of these
icequakes registering 4.6 or greater on the Richter
scale doubled from 7 in 1993 to 14 in the late 1990s;
it doubled again by 2005. A satellite that measures
minute changes in Earth's gravitational field found
the mass of Greenland to have decreased by 50 cubic
miles of ice in 2005. West Antarctica's mass decreased
by a similar amount.

The effect of this loss of ice on the global sea level
is small, so far, but it is accelerating. The
likelihood of the sudden collapse of ice sheets
increases as global warming continues. For example,
wet ice is darker, absorbing more sunlight, which
increases the melting rate of the ice. Also, the
warming ocean melts the offshore accumulations of
ice-"ice shelves"- that form a barrier between the ice
sheets and the ocean. As the ice shelves melt, more
icebergs are discharged from the ice sheets into the
ocean. And as the ice sheet discharges more icebergs
into the ocean and loses mass, its surface sinks to a
lower level where the temperature is warmer, causing
it to melt faster.

The business-as-usual scenario, with five degrees
Fahrenheit global warming and ten degrees Fahrenheit
at the ice sheets, certainly would cause the
disintegration of ice sheets. The only question is
when the collapse of these sheets would begin. The
business-as-usual scenario, which could lead to an
eventual sea level rise of eighty feet, with twenty
feet or more per century, could produce global chaos,
leaving fewer resources with which to mitigate the
change in climate. The alternative scenario, with
global warming under two degrees Fahrenheit, still
produces a significant rise in the sea level, but its
slower rate, probably less than a few feet per
century, would allow time to develop strategies that
would adapt to, and mitigate, the rise in the sea
level.

3.

Both the Department of Energy and some fossil fuel
companies insist that continued growth of fossil fuel
use and of CO2 emissions are facts that cannot be
altered to any great extent. Their prophecies become
self-fulfilling, with the help of government subsidies
and intensive efforts by special interest groups to
prevent the public from becoming well-informed.

In reality, an alternative scenario is possible and
makes sense for other reasons, especially in the US,
which has become an importer of energy, hemorrhaging
wealth to foreign nations in order to pay for it. In
response to oil shortages and price rises in the
1970s, the US slowed its growth in energy use mainly
by requiring an increase from thirteen to twenty-four
miles per gallon in the standard of auto efficiency.
Economic growth was decoupled from growth in the use
of fossil fuels and the gains in efficiency were felt
worldwide. Global growth of CO2 emissions slowed from
more than 4 percent each year to between 1 and 2
percent growth each year.

This slower growth rate in fossil fuel use was
maintained despite lower energy prices. The US is
still only half as efficient in its use of energy as
Western Europe, i.e., the US emits twice as much CO2
to produce a unit of GNP, partly because Europe
encourages efficiency by fossil fuel taxes. China and
India, using older technologies, are less
energy-efficient than the US and have a higher rate of
CO2 emissions.

Available technologies would allow great improvement
of energy efficiency, even in Europe. Economists agree
that the potential could be achieved most effectively
by a tax on carbon emissions, although strong
political leadership would be needed to persuasively
explain the case for such a tax to the public. The tax
could be revenue-neutral, i.e., it could also provide
for tax credits or tax decreases for the public
generally, leaving government revenue unchanged; and
it should be introduced gradually. The consumer who
makes a special effort to save energy could gain,
benefiting from the tax credit or decrease while
buying less fuel; the well-to-do consumer who insisted
on having three Hummers would pay for his own
excesses.

Achieving a decline in CO2 emissions faces two major
obstacles: the huge number of vehicles that are
inefficient in their use of fuel and the continuing
CO2 emissions from power plants. Auto makers oppose
efficiency standards and prominently advertise their
heaviest and most powerful vehicles, which yield the
greatest short-term profits. Coal companies want new
coal-fired power plants to be built soon, thus
assuring long-term profits.

The California legislature has passed a regulation
requiring a 30 percent reduction in automobile
greenhouse gas emissions by 2016. If adopted
nationwide, this regulation would save more than $150
billion annually in oil imports. In thirty-five years
it would save seven times the amount of oil estimated
by the US Geological Services to exist in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. By fighting it in court,
automakers and the Bush administra-tion have stymied
the California law, which many other states stand
ready to adopt. Further reductions of emissions would
be possible by means of technologies now being
developed. For example, new hybrid cars with larger
batteries and the ability to plug into wall outlets
will soon be available; and cars whose bodies are made
of a lightweight carbon composite would get better
mileage.

If power plants are to achieve the goals of the
alternative scenario, construction of new coal-fired
power plants should be delayed until the technology
needed to capture and sequester their CO2 emissions is
available. In the interim, new electricity
requirements should be met by the use of renewable
energies such as wind power as well as by nuclear
power and other sources that do not produce CO2. Much
could be done to limit emissions by improving the
standards of fuel efficiency in buildings, lighting,
and appliances. Such improvements are entirely
possible, but strong leadership would be required to
bring them about. The most effective action, as I have
indicated, would be a slowly increasing carbon tax,
which could be revenue-neutral or would cover a
portion of the costs of mitigating climate change.

The alternative scenario I have been referring to has
been designed to be consistent with the Kyoto
Protocol, i.e., with a world in which emissions from
developed countries would decrease slowly early in
this century and the developing countries would get
help to adopt "clean" energy technologies that would
limit the growth of their emissions. Delays in that
approach-especially US refusal both to participate in
Kyoto and to improve vehicle and power plant
efficiencies-and the rapid growth in the use of dirty
technologies have resulted in an increase of 2 percent
per year in global CO2 emissions during the past ten
years. If such growth continues for another decade,
emissions in 2015 will be 35 percent greater than they
were in 2000, making it impractical to achieve results
close to the alternative scenario.

The situation is critical, because of the clear
difference between the two scenarios I have projected.
Further global warming can be kept within limits
(under two degrees Fahrenheit) only by means of
simultaneous slowdown of CO2 emissions and absolute
reduction of the principal non-CO2agents of global
warming, particularly emissions of methane gas. Such
methane emissions are not only the second-largest
human contribution to climate change but also the main
cause of an increase in ozone-the third-largest
human-produced greenhouse gas-in the troposphere, the
lowest part of the Earth's atmosphere. Practical
methods can be used to reduce human sources of methane
emission, for example, at coal mines, landfills, and
waste management facilities. However, the question is
whether these reductions will be overwhelmed by the
release of frozen methane hydrates- the ice-like
crystals in which large deposits of methane are
trapped-if permafrost melts.

If both the slowdown in CO2 emissions and reductions
in non-CO2 emissions called for by the alternative
scenario are achieved, release of "frozen methane"
should be moderate, judging from prior interglacial
periods that were warmer than today by one or two
degrees Fahrenheit. But if CO2 emissions are not
limited and further warming reaches three or four
degrees Fahrenheit, all bets are off. Indeed, there is
evidence that greater warming could release
substantial amounts of methane in the Arctic. Much of
the ten-degree Fahrenheit global warming that caused
mass extinctions, such as the one at the
Paleocene-Eocene boundary, appears to have been caused
by release of "frozen methane." Those releases of
methane may have taken place over centuries or
millennia, but release of even a significant fraction
of the methane during this century could accelerate
global warming, preventing achievement of the
alternative scenario and possibly causing ice sheet
disintegration and further long-term methane release
that are out of our control.

Any responsible assessment of environmental impact
must conclude that further global warming exceeding
two degrees Fahrenheit will be dangerous. Yet because
of the global warming already bound to take place as a
result of the continuing long-term effects of
greenhouse gases and the energy systems now in use,
the two-degree Fahrenheit limit will be exceeded
unless a change in direction can begin during the
current decade. Unless this fact is widely
communicated, and decision-makers are responsive, it
will soon be impossible to avoid climate change with
far-ranging undesirable consequences. We have reached
a critical tipping point.

4.

The public can act as our planet's keeper, as has been
shown in the past. The first human-made atmospheric
crisis emerged in 1974, when the chemists Sherry
Rowland and Mario Molina reported that
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) might destroy the
stratospheric ozone layer that protects animal and
plant life from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.
How narrowly we escaped disaster was not realized
until years later.

CFC appeared to be a marvelous inert chemical, one so
useful as an aerosol propellant, fire suppressor, and
refrigerant fluid that CFC production increased 10
percent per year for decades. If this
business-as-usual growth of CFCs had continued just
one more decade, the stratospheric ozone layer would
have been severely depleted over the entire planet and
CFCs themselves would have caused a larger greenhouse
effect than CO2.

Instead, the press and television reported Rowland and
Molina's warning widely. The public, responding to the
warnings of environmental groups, boycotted frivolous
use of CFCs as propellants for hair spray and
deodorant, and chose non-CFC products instead. The
annual growth of CFC usage plummeted immediately from
10 percent to zero. Thus no new facilities to produce
CFCs were built. The principal CFC manufacturer, after
first questioning the scientific evidence, developed
alternative chemicals. When the use of CFCs for
refrigeration began to increase and a voluntary
phaseout of CFCs for that purpose proved ineffective,
the US and European governments took the lead in
negotiating the Montreal Protocol to control the
production of CFCs. Developing countries were allowed
to increase the use of CFCs for a decade and they were
given financial assistance to construct alternative
chemical plants. The result is that the use of CFCs is
now decreasing, the ozone layer was damaged but not
destroyed, and it will soon be recovering.

Why are the same scientists and political forces that
succeeded in controlling the threat to the ozone layer
now failing miserably to deal with the global warming
crisis? Though we depend on fossil fuels far more than
we ever did on CFCs, there is plenty of blame to go
around. Scientists present the facts about climate
change clinically, failing to stress that
business-as-usual will transform the planet. The press
and television, despite an overwhelming scientific
consensus concerning global warming, give equal time
to fringe "contrarians" supported by the fossil fuel
industry. Special interest groups mount effective
disinformation campaigns to sow doubt about the
reality of global warming. The government appears to
be strongly influenced by special interests, or
otherwise confused and distracted, and it has failed
to provide leadership. The public is understandably
confused or uninterested.

I used to spread the blame uniformly until, when I was
about to appear on public television, the producer
informed me that the program "must" also include a
"contrarian" who would take issue with claims of
global warming. Presenting such a view, he told me,
was a common practice in commercial television as well
as radio and newspapers. Supporters of public TV or
advertisers, with their own special interests, require
"balance" as a price for their continued financial
support. Gore's book reveals that while more than half
of the recent newspaper articles on climate change
have given equal weight to such contrarian views,
virtually none of the scientific articles in
peer-reviewed journals have questioned the consensus
that emissions from human activities cause global
warming. As a result, even when the scientific
evidence is clear, technical nit-picking by
contrarians leaves the public with the false
impression that there is still great scientific
uncertainty about the reality and causes of climate
change.

The executive and legislative branches of the US
government seek excuses to justify their inaction. The
President, despite conclusive reports from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the
National Academy of Sciences, welcomes contrary advice
from Michael Crichton, a science fiction writer.
Senator James Inhofe, chairman of the Committee on
Environment and Public Works, describes global warming
as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American
people" and has used aggressive tactics, including a
lawsuit to suppress a federally funded report on
climate change, to threaten and intimidate scientists.

Policies favoring the short-term profits of energy
companies and other special interests are cast by many
politicians as being in the best economic interests of
the country. They take no account of the mounting
costs of environmental damage and of the future costs
of maintaining the supply of fossil fuels. Leaders
with a long-term vision would place greater value on
developing more efficient energy technology and
sources of clean energy. Rather than subsidizing
fossil fuels, the government should provide incentives
for fossil-fuel companies to develop other kinds of
energy.

Who will pay for the tragic effects of a warming
climate? Not the political leaders and business
executives I have mentioned. If we pass the crucial
point and tragedies caused by climate change begin to
unfold, history will judge harshly the scientists,
reporters, special interests, and politicians who
failed to protect the planet. But our children will
pay the consequences.

The US has heavy legal and moral responsibilities for
what is now happening. Of all the CO2 emissions
produced from fossil fuels so far, we are responsible
for almost 30 percent, an amount much larger than that
of the next-closest countries, China and Russia, each
less than 8 percent. Yet our responsibility and
liability may run higher than those numbers suggest.
The US cannot validly claim to be ignorant of the
consequences. When nations must abandon large parts of
their land because of rising seas, what will our
liability be? And will our children, as adults in the
world, carry a burden of guilt, as Germans carried
after World War II, however unfair inherited blame may
be?

The responsibility of the US goes beyond its
disproportionate share of the world's emissions. By
refusing to participate in the Kyoto Protocol, we
delayed its implementation and weakened its
effectiveness, thus undermining the attempt of the
international community to slow down the emissions of
developed countries in a way consistent with the
alternative scenario. If the US had accepted the Kyoto
Protocol, it would have been possible to reduce the
growing emissions of China and India through the
Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, by which the
developed countries could offset their own continuing
emissions by investing in projects to reduce emissions
in the developing countries. This would have eased the
way to later full participation by China and India, as
occurred with the Montreal Protocol. The US was right
to object to quotas in the Kyoto Protocol that were
unfair to the US; but an appropriate response would
have been to negotiate revised quotas, since US
political and technology leadership are essential for
dealing with climate change.

It is not too late. The US hesitated to enter other
conflicts in which the future was at stake. But enter
we did, earning gratitude in the end, not
condemnation. Such an outcome is still feasible in the
case of global warming, but just barely.

As explained above, we have at most ten years-not ten
years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter
fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse
emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made
the task more difficult, since emissions in the
developing world are accelerating. To achieve the
alternative scenario will require prompt gains in
energy efficiencies so that the supply of conventional
fossil fuels can be sustained until advanced
technologies can be developed. If instead we follow an
energy-intensive path of squeezing liquid fuels from
tar sands, shale oil, and heavy oil, and do so without
capturing and sequestering CO2 emissions, climate
disasters will become unavoidable.

5.

When I recently met Larry King, he said, "Nobody cares
about fifty years from now." Maybe so. But climate
change is already evident. And if we stay on the
business-as-usual course, disastrous effects are no
further from us than we are from the Elvis era. Is it
possible for a single book on global warming to
convince the public, as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
did for the dangers of DDT? Bill McKibben's excellent
book The End of Nature is usually acknowledged as
having been the most effective so far, but perhaps
what is needed is a range of books dealing with
different aspects of the global warming story.

Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes, based on a series of
articles she wrote for The New Yorker, is illuminating
and sobering, a good book to start with. The reader is
introduced to some of the world's leading climate
researchers who explain the dangers in reasonably
nontechnical language but without sacrificing
scientific accuracy. The book includes fascinating
accounts of how climate changes affected the planet in
the past, and how such changes are occurring in
different parts of the world right now. 

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