Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming – Review
Through most of the 20th Century, and with the exemption of some minor schools and a few major universities, mostly Midwestern, “Geography” as a serious, college-level area of study was called in lesser repute. As early as the 1920s Geography was okay for high school, the refrain eventually went, but of limited utility in a world where specific disciplines were already on hand to deal with biology (and later enviro sci and biomes), meteorology and climatology, geology, and “human geography” and population studies. To research and teach in a Geography (or Physical Geography or Geology and Geography) department was to be so very generalized as to produce just inferior and imitative research, or so it was declared. Glenn Thomas Trewartha (1896 – ?? ) privately held a Ph.D. (1924) from the University of Wisconsin/Madison, but he was anything but a blinkered acadmic: in his life he eventually went outside the box and addressed all method of developments of the broad topic of Geography. To name just a few of Trewartha’s many accomplishments, in the 1930s he locally produced a social history of Japan and quickly learned commentary on the environmental subfield usually called “oak savannah.” From the mid-Thirties to the Sixties, he wrote a amount of texts that eventually became seminal to college Georgraphy classes. In 1954, he completely revised the prevalent Koeppen method of climate classification to make it more useful to North Americans, but did so without sacrificing the original Koeppen system’s rigorous methodology, based entirely on practical knowledge. It eventually took a good exchange of research, but the result was to provide climatic guidelines that roughly corresponded much more closesly to the terrain and flora of the Eastern U.S., the Midwest, and the Mediterranean West Coast, as strongly opposed to Koeppen’s system which is a better descriptor of the milder “west coast” (i.e., Maritime) climate of Western Europe. Trewartha was also writing about “population studies” before that was cool, and he clearly defined “problem climates” as far back as the early 1960s as those that eventually went beyond what natural climate studies would have correctly predicted. This also explicitly included the elements of the originally inhabited earth that had been frequently ravaged by the predations of humankind: by pollution, clear-cutting, overpopulation and such. This second journal of THE EARTH’S PROBLEM CLIMATES from 1981 is a equally fascinating and still very valuable book. Coming off a base in climate studies as well as natural geography, Trewartha, in essence, urged us to consider the threat of global warming well before that term appeared into general use. The original 1961 edition heads that way too, but it is harder to find. You will even find academics who say that Trewartha’s many contributions, of which I’ve sketched only a few, have been “eclipsed” by developments in later fields — their fields. Maybe so, but one could also say that Glenn Trewartha was not only smart and hard-working but nimble enough to hop over the arbitrary fences that separate literary analysis of the structure of the earth and its fauna and flora, the atmosphere (both climatic and meteorological), and even social science (population) today. Trewartha wasn’t so much “eclipsed” so much as he greatly helped to set the background. THE EARTH’S PROBLEM CLIMATES is warmly recommended. So is Trewartha’s INTRODUCTION TO CLIMATE, 1954 and later revisions.

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