Reviews
Editors’ Choice
Hot Picks We asked some of the leading thinkers and writers on climate change which books they recommend.
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Fred Krupp
President of the Environmental Defense Fund
Recommends: The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, by Tim Flannery, Grove Press, 384 pages, $15
The most powerful account available of the overwhelming science behind global warming, written in a poetic and highly engaging style. Flannery describes the odyssey that led him to the conclusion that global warming is the paramount challenge of our time.
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Chris Mooney
Author of three books, including New York Times bestseller The Republican War on Science
Recommends: The Discovery of Global Warming, by Spencer Weart, Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $17.95
I think Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming is my favorite, and the reason is that it teaches you there is a long history to this issue and, in fact, the science of climate is built on a foundation of well over 100 years.
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Elizabeth Kolbert
Journalist and author of Field Notes From a Catastrophe
Recommends: The Two-Mile Time Machine, by Richard B. Alley, Princeton University Press, 240 pages, $19.95
By now a lot of very good books have been written about climate change. One that I always recommend is Richard B. Alley’s The Two-Mile Time Machine. Alley is a glaciologist at Penn State, and his book explains what’s been learned about the history of the climate from ice cores drilled on Greenland. (At its center, the Greenland ice sheet is two miles thick; hence the title.) Even though it appeared a decade ago, Time Machine is still entirely relevant. It’s the kind of book that makes you look at the world in a new way.
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Amory Lovins
Cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute
Recommends: Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken, Back Bay Books, 416 pages, $18.99
The most important climate book I know is the one my colleagues and I are now writing for publication in 2011. Reinventing Fire will map the business-led transition from oil and coal (and ultimately natural gas) to efficiency and renewables—thereby solving the climate and oil problems not at a cost but at a profit. Meanwhile, our 2000 business book for Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism (free here), contains important elements of that synthesis and a simple primer on climate change.
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Terry Root
Stanford University biologist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report author
Recommends: Science as a Contact Sport, by Stephen H. Schneider, National Geographic, 304 pages, $28
Science as a contact sport goes through the history of the work on climate change. It explains how the disinformation put out by the naysayers was so effective (and wrong, obviously) and how it has gotten in the way of science. The book also does a great job of stating problems and solutions in plain, easy-to-understand English.
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John McPhee
Author of 27 books and the forthcoming essay collection Silk Parachute
Recommends: Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, by Elizabeth Kolbert, Bloomsbury USA, 240 pages, $14.95
Elizabeth Kolbert has been almost everywhere and has returned with the evidence.
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Van Jones
Environmental justice activist and author of The Green Collar Economy
Recommends: Earth: The Sequel, by Fred Krupp and Miriam Hom, W.W. Norton & Co., 304 pages, $15.95
Fred Krupp understands that America’s greatest resource, the collective genius and wisdom of its people, is still in abundance. That’s why in Earth: The Sequel he paints a hopeful vision of America’s future—one where we unleash our entrepreneurial spirit to solve the climate crisis.
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Eileen Claussen
President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change
Recommends: Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman, Picador, 528 pages, $16
With a wealth of examples, Thomas Friedman clearly connects the dots between climate change, energy security, and economic growth. He argues persuasively that seizing the opportunity to transform the way we generate and use energy is a surefire way for America to “get its groove back” and regain its moral and economic leadership.
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Richard Cizik
Evangelical leader and environmental advocate
Recommends: The Power of Sustainable Thinking, by Bob Doppelt, Earthscan, 240 pages, $24.95
In the evangelical community, the need is not just to change what we think but how we think. Thus the book that has helped me the most to move otherwise unmovable people is Bob Doppelt’s The Power of Sustainable Thinking. As Jesus said, As a man [or woman] thinketh, so he [she] is.
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Paul Epstein
Associate director of Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment
Recommends: The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming, by Guy Dauncey, New Society, 320 pages, $24.95
An insightful, comprehensive examination of the challenges we face—relevant to investors, lawmakers, and the general public.
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Alice Waters
Organic food advocate, chef, and author
Recommends: Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, by Anna Lappé, Bloomsbury USA, 336 pages, $24
Anna Lappé knows that if we are serious about climate change, then we have to begin to talk about food. She makes yet another compelling argument as to why we have no choice but to reconsider a food system that is responsible for as much as one-third of all greenhouse-gas emissions. Anna provides a hopeful vision and shows that so many answers to these challenges lie in sustainable and organic farming.
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EDITORS’ CHOICE
Storms of My Grandchildren
By James Hansen
Bloomsbury Publishing, 320 pages, $25
Climatologist James Hansen started out studying Venus’s clouds, but understanding earth’s climate seemed “more useful and interesting,” he writes in his debut book. Talk about an accurate prediction. Through his work and outspokenness, Hansen has drawn attention to global warming. Storms is an elucidating guide to what we know about climate change and a call to arms. Hansen favors “fee and dividend”—taxing carbon sources and giving the profits directly to the public. He rejects a cap-and-trade system, and compares offsets to indulgences in the Middle Ages: “People of means loved indulgences, because they could practice any hanky-panky or worse, then simply purchase an indulgence to avoid punishment.” He also advocates rapidly phasing out coal and leaving oil shale and tar sands underground. For readers wary of detailed scientific explanations, the book is dense. The account of Washington politics is more accessible. He chastises Capitol Hill for adhering to “business as usual” and highlights science censorship. “Without a well-informed public,” he writes, “humanity itself and all species on the planet are threatened.” Storms gives us that vital information.—Julie Leibach
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After the Ice
By Alun Anderson
Smithsonian, 304 pages, $26.99
Plankton, pipelines, and glaciers don’t hold the same star quality as polar bears, but each plays an integral part in what Alun Anderson calls the “Arctic’s revenge.” Human actions, he warns, have wrought dynamic responses from the top of the world. The biologist and journalist carries his readers there, gliding over shrinking expanses of sea ice, under it, and around in accelerating feedback loops that attack the ice from both directions. “What stronger sign of climate change could there be than millions of square kilometers of white ice turning to dark water in less than a single lifetime?” he asks. Meanwhile, melting permafrost is releasing methane, further cranking up the thermostat. An ice-free Arctic is imminent. The only question is if its inhabitants—from reindeer herders to algae—can adapt. Change is already under way. New oil reserves and shipping routes are opening up, and killer whales are swimming where polar bears once stood.—Lynne Peeples
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The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate
By David Archer
Princeton University Press, 180 pages, $22.95
When we talk about climate change’s looming effects, we usually focus on the 21st century. We consider how temperature rising a couple of degrees will affect our grandkids, but we rarely contemplate the climate we may bestow on our descendents in 1,000 years or on the planet in 100,000. In his short yet fact-filled book The Long Thaw, author and ocean chemist David Archer explains why our planet could remain hot and wet for hundreds of millennia to come. Through accessible analogies, Archer sums up the planet’s present and past climates, laying the groundwork to discuss the distant future. Atmospheric CO2 will be plentiful because the stuff will hang around. The ocean, trees, and soil will absorb some of the greenhouse gas, but even so, Archer estimates, “about ten percent of the CO2 from coal will still be affecting the climate in one hundred thousand years.” Sustained warmth could provoke the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to melt rapidly, and even under the best circumstances cause a minimum 33-foot rise in sea level over the next several thousand years, drowning low-lying areas like Manhattan and Miami. Looking even further ahead, Archer says CO2 concentrations might push back the next ice age (anticipated in 50 millennia) for up to 500,000 years. Its ambling prose and a one-page index do not make Thaw ideal for climate science beginners, but it’s a lively and masterful review of climate history, which ultimately is our best guide for avoiding a long, hot future.—Victoria Schlesinger
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