Books
Since 1979, when the National Academy of Sciences undertook its first major study of global warming, "Americans have been alerted to the dangers of climate change so many times that reproducing even a small fraction of these warnings would fill several volumes," writes Elizabeth Kolbert. So far none of these warnings have had much effect. Why try again now? Because, as both Kolbert and Tim Flannery tell us in their new books on the subject, it has become obvious that global warming is already happening. What's more, they each claim, civilization itself is in danger.
Kolbert's book, Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (Bloomsbury, $22.95), is based on articles that appeared in The New Yorker. In compelling prose, she takes us to places where warming is already visible—primarily, in the formerly frozen North—and talks to scientists who are studying everything from melting sea ice in the Arctic to migrating butterflies in Britain. On one expedition in 1997, for instance, researchers on a Canadian ship studying sea ice found they kept falling through it. Though Kolbert's choice of subject is occasionally debatable—she devotes six pages of a slim book to a small mosquito whose DNA has mutated in response to warming—the details she amasses drive home her message: The world is changing fast.
