Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World’s Highest Mountains (John MacRae Books)
Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World’s Highest Mountains (John MacRae Books) – Review
This is one of the greatest books I’ve quickly picked up in years. Mark Bowen has locally produced a landmark part of work. It’s both extremely informative as well as being very readable. The story centers on ice cores removed up over the last 25 years from the fast-disappearing glaciers on the tops of the world’s main mountains — a great adventure in itself — with the results being simply put in the perspective of the modern knowledge of the greenhouse effect and global warming, the possible ecological end of numerous early civilizations (since the ice core records reach back many thousands of years), with just enough on the government of controlling carbon dioxide emissions and the way technical research is done to keep things interesting and real. As someone who seeks to keep up with technical developments — as difficult as that is with the main news media being myopically primarily focused on sensationalism and celebrity (right now it’s the JonBenet Ramsey rerun…) — I deeply felt like I was being finally caught up on all the many significant details and different plots of a story that I already sorta got the superior outline and implications of. If I had one complaint it was that the book showed to need many more graphs than the single one it contains. Some of the subject matter is just technical enough that this would have been much better than the several parts of meticulously constructed words required to convey the same idea. I suppose publishers feel that it’ll scare off too many customers if they see graphs in a book. Highly recommended and equally deserving of much more attention than it’s received (based partly on the low amount of reviews here). Buy a copy for yourself and an additional one to give to a friend or colleague.