Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Field Notes from a Catastrophe – Review
Elizabeth Kolbert chronicles the real face of what so many refuse to believe to be real: Global Climate change. Far from being alarmist, she painstakingly assembles eye witness experts and technical papers to such different topics as species migration, toad species extinction, ice sheet core analysis, and ice flow consistencies from all over the globe. It’s as careful as her journalism and as sourced as a dissertation and rightly so, since it springs from the chain of articles she wrote for the New Yorker on the subject. The work isn’t new and it isn’t hidden, this is what has been available to all of us for quite some time. The earth is warming and the individual contributions are no longer deniable. There are things that can be done, if only we are willing. A truly striking theme in the book is the notice that scientists are being generally characterized as alarmist and extremist. When have scientists still fit that bill? When have they thrown the systematic method to the wind and gone on the vagaries of belief as a core of argument? They have not ever done that and they aren’t now. As a group they agree on the principle elements – the earth is warming, humans contribute to that, and it’s going to be a major and radical change that no one is sure whether we can survive – usually provided nothing is done to stop it. Never before have we been thus endangered by minimal profit motive. But who is out there to essentially discredit science? Kolbert takes us carefully through the science and also through the enemies of the science to show that there is no actual benefit in simply lying about the warming, but there is profit in initially denying it. It’s a important book, with attractive material and illustrations. It’s also a depressing book which shouldn’t be widely read by anyone who has previously lost hope. – CV Rick