The Big Sizzle

There's a rash of new climate titles out in bookstores. Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers was published in his native Australia some while ago, but has only recently hit shelves in the US. Then there's Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change, Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe and Andrew Revkin's book for young readers, The North Pole Was Here.

Grist manages to review all of the above, (here and here), while the New York Times' Janet Maslin reviews Flannery and Linden here, and The Economist reviews Flannery and Kolbert here.

Maslin makes the obvious points that writing about climate is problematic because the subject is a) complicated, b) politically loaded and c) depressing. Beyond that, her review gives only a glancing appraisal. She finds Linden too levelheaded and Flannery too worked up.

The Economist reviewer notes that Kolbert and Flannery hail from the only industrialized countries that refused to ratify Kyoto. He (or she?) finds Kolbert stronger on the politics, Flannery stronger on the science as well as on the prescriptions for what to do about it. The reviewer observes:

Mr Flannery's most intriguing thought, though, is almost a throwaway point. But it is one that only an evolutionary biologist would have come up with. He suggests that if humanity were facing the threat of cold, rather than heat, the talking would have been over long ago and a strong plan of action would be in place. His point is that Homo sapiens is a tropical species which, having only recently spread to temperate and frigid climes, still thinks like a tropical species. It really fears the cold, but rather likes the heat. The word “warming”, therefore, has positive overtones.

It's an observation that sends one searching for semantic alternatives. Global melting? Climate Destabilization? The Big Sizzle?

Denis Hayes reviews Field Notes for Grist, praising Kolbert's skill as a reporter, able to both clarify the science and bring to life the scientists that are her subjects. He finds a remark by one of those subjects to be a fitting summation of the book. Rob Socolow, codirector of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative tells Kolbert:

"I've been involved in a number of fields where there's a lay opinion and a scientific opinion, ... And in most cases it's the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious ... But in the climate case, the experts -- the people who work with climate models every day, the people who do ice cores -- they are more concerned. They are going out of their way to say, 'Wake up!'

We should all hope that these books sell well. If they don't, it's doubtless for the very reasons Maslin pointed to; namely, the subject is a) complicated and c) depressing. If anything b) -- politically charged -- is a selling point, something to wake us up.