BOOKSHELF 



By Laurence A. Marschall 



Field Notes from a Catastrophe: 

 Man, Nature, and Climate Change 



by Elizabeth Kolbert 

 Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006; 

 $22.95 



From a scientific standpoint, one 

 might argue, we don't need another 

 book on global warming. Everyone, it 

 seems, knows about melting icecaps 

 and hyperactive hurricanes. If you ski, 

 you curse the warmer winters. If you 

 own beachfront property — or reside on 

 a coral atoll — you fear rising sea levels. 



What is more, scientists seem to be 

 in general agreement about the para- 

 meters of the scientific problem, even 

 if some details of the current thaw re- 

 main to be determined. Few scientists 

 doubt that the Earth's mean tempera- 

 ture has been rising at a rate unprece- 

 dented in recent geological history. 



iir. ' , * • 



Erosion on Sarichef Island, Alaska, from storms and rising 

 sea levels has forced the inhabitants to abandon the island 

 for the mainland. 



Few question the increased concentra- 

 tion of greenhouse gases in the atmos- 

 phere, and few deny that the burning 

 of fossil fuels is the major source of this 

 increase. And though computerized 

 models lead to divergent predictions 

 about which factors ultimately have 

 the most effect on future climate, there 

 is little disagreement that some kind of 

 climatic change is in progress. Dra- 

 matic changes have taken place in the 

 past, and there is no reason to expect 

 today to be any different. Scientifically 



speaking, global warming is old news. 



But because of the nature of global 

 warming — transnational in scope, and 

 very likely tied to pollution caused by 

 human activity — what to do with the 

 bare facts is a political problem. From 

 that point of view, Elizabeth Kolbert's 

 book is more than welcome. Politi- 

 cians, as you may have noted (more and 

 more these days), are relatively insensi- 

 tive to the raw power of scientific ar- 

 guments. Faced with proof that the sky 

 is indeed tailing, decision makers still 

 need to feel the will of their con- 

 stituents: voters who would prefer that 

 the sky not fall, and who make it clear 

 that public and private funds should be 

 devoted to keeping the sky from falling. 



Elizabeth Kolbert presents a series of 

 succinct and astutely written bulletins 

 from the front lines of the climate- 

 change community, and her assembly of 

 the "old news" may still change the 

 right minds in the right 

 places. Rather than re- 

 viewing the usual evi- 

 dence, she has sought 

 out voices who speak 

 with knowledge and 

 conviction about what 

 is happening to the 

 planet. The most dra- 

 matic effects of global 

 warming, she notes, 

 occur in places where 

 the fewest people live, 

 so she journeys to a 

 small island in the Arc- 

 tic Ocean, barely ten 

 feet above sea level. 

 Vladimir E. Roma- 

 novsky, a Russian geophysicist who has 

 been watching the island crumble in the 

 past decade as its permafrost melts, ges- 

 tures at the eroding bluffs. "Another dis- 

 appearing island," he says. Climate 

 change is "moving very, very fast." 



It's movingjust as fast on Greenland's 

 vanishing ice sheet, where thejakob- 

 shavn Isbr?e, a moving river of ice, has 

 more than doubled the rate of its slide 

 to the sea, from 3.5 miles per year m 

 1 992 to 7.8 miles per year in 2( )( 13. And 



it's moving fast in Iceland, too, where 

 Kolbert views the Solheimajokull, a 

 glacier that has retreated a fifth of a mile 

 m the past decade. By the end of the 

 century, an Icelandic glaciologist tells 

 her, the island, which has been contin- 

 ually glaciated for at least 2 million 

 years, will be virtually ice-free. 



What chmatologists worry about 

 most, Kolbert writes, is that humanity 

 may reach a tipping point, the state of 

 "DAI," or Dangerous Anthropogenic 

 Interference, where calamitous change 

 becomes inevitable. Climate modelers 

 such as James E. Hansen of NASA's 

 Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 

 whom Kolbert visits in New York City, 

 are hesitant to predict when the Earth 

 will cross the DAI line, or whether we 

 have crossed it already. But Hansen — 

 who recently made headlines when he 

 complained of being muzzled by po- 

 litical appointees in his agency — and 

 many of the other scientists, agency 

 functionaries, and political veterans 

 interviewed by Kolbert express dismay 

 that what seems to be the policy in the 

 face of the gathering storm is "business 

 as usual." 



It's hard not to share their concerns, 

 especially when Kolbert conveys their 

 insights with such immediacy and co- 

 gency. Take, for instance, the comment 

 made by another NASA scientist, sip- 

 ping coffee in a tent atop Greenland's 

 melting ice sheet: "To put it nicely, we 

 are heading into deep doo-doo." 



Wave-Swept Shore: The Rigors 

 of Life on a Rocky Coast 



by Mitni Koehl; photographs by 

 Anne Wertheim Rosenfcld 

 University of California Press 2006; 

 $39.95 



Successful symbiosis — the kind that 

 makes green algae and sea anemones 

 flourish in the intertidal zones along sea- 

 coasts — takes place between organisms 

 whose disparate talents complement 

 each other to the benefit of both. The 

 anemones, whose short, barrel-shaped 

 bodies are firmly anchored to rocks, pro- 



58 



NAIURAI HISTORY May 2006 



