A review of Elizabeth Kolbert's book, "Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change"
It’s hard to imagine another mass-market book that addresses the issue of global warming more completely than Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), but that’s not what Elizabeth Kolbert aims to do in “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change” (2006, Bloomsbury).
If Gore’s work can be compared to a Leonardo da Vinci drawing – exacting, even excruciating, detail and a straight-up rendering of reality, warts and all – then Kolbert’s effort is more Monet: broad strokes and impressionistic depictions. Stand back a bit, though, and the picture Kolbert paints is just as compelling as Gore’s: the Earth’s climate is changing in unprecedented (from the perspective of human history) ways, and our actions are driving that change.
“I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a scientific opinion,“ Princeton engineering professor Robert Socolow tells Kolbert in the chapter titled, “Business as Usual.” “And, in most of the cases, it’s the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious. If you take an extreme example, it would be nuclear power, where most of the people who work in nuclear science are relatively relaxed about very low levels of radiation. But, in the climate case, the experts – the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do the ice cores – they are more concerned. They’re going out of the way to say, ‘Wake up! This is not a good thing to be doing.’ “
Born out of a three-part series she wrote for the New Yorker, Kolbert’s book reads like part travelogue, part science primer, and the style is always straightforward and engaging. “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” explores diverse, yet ultimately connected, terrain: from Shishmaref, Alaska, where Inuit seal-hunters have switched from snowmobiles to boats because the sea ice has become too slushy to drive on, to Yorkshire, England, where butterflies are flitting farther north every year as the climate grows ever milder, from the Netherlands, which is giving reclaimed rural land back to the sea in an effort to protect its cities, to Burlington, Vermont, which has added everything from bike racks on city buses to a municipally-supported grocery store to cut down on residents’ need to drive and, as a result, carbon-dioxide emissions.
Along the way, Kolbert also introduces key players in the climate debate: James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who’s made headlines for accusing the Bush administration of trying to muzzle research and soft-pedal the data supporting climate change; global warming deniers like former Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe; political strategists like Frank Luntz, who advised Republicans to hammer voters with the message that the science of climate change still lacks consensus; and history and science studies professor Naomi Oreskes, who surveyed 900-plus peer-reviewed, published studies on climate change between 1993 and 2003, and found that none – that’s zero, zilch, nada – concluded human activity wasn’t fueling global warming.
As one scientist who speaks to Kolbert says, only partly in jest, “It’s true that we’ve had higher CO2 levels before. But, then, of course, we also had dinosaurs.”
“The feedbacks that have been identified in the climate system … take small changes to the system and amplify them into much larger forces,” Kolbert concludes. “Perhaps the most unpredictable feedback of all is the human one. With six billion people on the planet, the risks are everywhere apparent.”
