Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

Everyone needs to read this book. The series of her books on this topic are well written and speak volumes.

A short elegant book on the general topic of global warming. The book has her interviewing biologists and climateologists in the field following them around as they take their measurements and do their experiments. It's not strong on scientific explanation, but it's not bad either. A person with little science training in college should be able to follow it.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe is more than ten years old (I read the 2006 edition) but don’t let that dissuade you from reading this brisk, concise overview of climate change and all the reasons we should be worried.Very worried.Kolbert zooms in and zooms out, from details to big-picture analysis. She visits the Alaskan village of Shismaref five miles off the coast of the Seward Peninsula. She heads to Swiss Camp, a research station on a platform drilled into the Greenland ice sheet. And, among other locations, she takes a look at the Monteverde Cloud Forest in north-central Costa Rica. Everywhere she goes are clear-eyed scientists doing their thing—observing, monitoring, measuring. And watching the world change under the pressures of global warming.Everywhere Kolbert stops, the signs of change are abundant, unequivocal, unambiguous—all without being sensational. We are sloppy drunk on fossil fuels and show no interest in sobering up. Kolbert’s writing is matter-of-fact, understated, and calm. Published the same year as Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth was released (based on Al Gore’s talks on climate change), Kolbert’s narrative sounds the alarm in no uncertain terms, but it’s hardly a diatribe. Bitterness is buried in the brutal facts.What is worrisome is to read this and know the data have only grown worse over the last decade, particularly with deniers backed by the billionaires who crowd the Oval Office, the backwards-thinking head of the EPA who scrubbed the agency’s website of any mention of climate change, and many of their backers and political supporters. The cautionary mention in Field Notes about increasing hurricane strength—the book was finishing up around the time of Hurricane Katrina—comes across as tame and quaint in the wake of Harvey, Irma and Maria during 2017.Recently (Nov. 2, 2017), 13 federal agencies unveiled an exhaustive scientific report that blamed humans as the dominant cause for creating the warmest period in the history of civilization. This “finding” is in direct conflict with the Trump administration’s position on climate change, but should we be encouraged by its publication? What will provoke our leaders to put some urgency behind the many steps that could be implemented to entice a new pattern of behavior and energy use?It has been “business as usual,” for the most part, since Field Notes was published and Kolbert’s most devastating chapter underscores that even the introduction of various “stabilization wedges” won’t be easy to adopt. And might be too late, given the momentum that climate change has gained.The "wedges" are things like solar power, wind power, nuclear power, cutting energy use in residential and commercial buildings by a quarter, or slashing automobile use in half and simultaneously doubling fuel efficiency. The “wedges” were developed by Robert Socolow, a professor of engineering at Princeton.“All of Socolow’s calculations,” Kolbert writes, “are based on the notion—clearly hypothetical—that steps to stabilize emissions will be taken immediately, or at least within the next few years … The overriding message of Socolow’s wedges is that the longer we wait—and the more infrastructure we build without regard to its impact on emissions—the more daunting the task of keeping CO2 levels below 500 parts per million will become.” (We sailed right past 400 PPM last in March 2017).Will we heat the atmosphere to the point where there are crocodiles at the poles, as there were in the Cretaceous? Seems like we’re headed there.Maybe, if we can make Field Notes required reading in every high school today, we could begin to turn the trend around.Maybe. Right now, as Kolbert concludes, we are destroying ourselves. And doing precious little about it.

The last sentence of this book states the author’s onerous conclusion: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing”.In her previous book, “The Sixth Extinction”, I was impressed with her prognostication that global warming is directly destroying life at the bottom of our global ecological community. But life on Earth is interdependent and all life will be affected right up to the masters of the planet, humans.Just as world leaders ignored scientists warnings of the emerging corona virus pandemic, world leaders cannot agree on the threat of global warming despite many strong, independent scientific forecasts on the future consequences of an overheated planet. Long term planning for ten to fifteen years into the future is beyond the capacity of our world governmental authorities. For most politicians, two years is a long term when a reelection campaign must be promoted. A global catastrophe projected to have to take place ten years from now is for the chicken-littles of our society. Politicians do not get reelected by proposing tax increases to provide for reducing air and water pollution to avoid future planet environmental overload. A large fraction of our well educated population would prefer to believe in unfounded conspiracy theories rather than rational scientific reality. In this anthropogenic era, reason is on the road to extinction. More troubling is that we, as a society, are not willing to be enlightened to reality. We prefer the artificial world of our TV soap operas.

I expected the full text; what I got was a small proportion of the actual book. Was I conned?I had the original paperback and was already aware of what I was meaning to read,

Elizabeth has gotten exceptional small gift to get the point throughit goes straight in the heart

Excellent description of the subject.

Top class field reporting

Elizabeth Kolbert is the Richard Dawkins of Climate Change.