The elevated freeways of New Orleans were empty except for a few garbage-strewn encampments of hurricane refugees huddled along the railings. Devoid of traffic, the open belts of asphalt looked wide and graceful. Below the highway the dark floodwaters reflected a bent and oily version of the buildings and brilliant blue posthurricane sky. The police department and local government had evaporated in the storm, and the military was only just arriving.
Driving the wrong way down the empty four-lane freeways I hit speeds of ninety miles per hour, my rental car’s trunk filled with extra water, gasoline, and canned sardines. At the base of a bridge in a dry section of town stands a McDonald’s sign stripped of its yellow and red plastic, reduced to a skeletal M. Nearby a city bus is jackknifed in the street. Moving east through Westwego and Gretna, I meet a rescue crew following the stench of corpses into some rubble.
There is no longer any real debate: the earth’s climate is warming and will change significantly within most of our lifetimes. Most heavily impacted will be coastal cities, the economic hubs of modern human civilization. They are the cockpits of commerce, trade, research, transportation, and education, the nodes that link the world economy together.
Many civilizations have lived in the shadow of their own end-time narratives and it would be nice to discount the story of climate change as the same old archetypal vision of the apocalypse played out in a secularized form. But this time the story is backed up by sophisticated science, most of which is converging into an unassailable consensus.
The books under review here share substantial overlap, to the point where they are almost variations on the same template. This reflects the fact that scientists with different specialties — the atmosphere, ocean currents, the ancient fossil record, ecosystems — are all independently arriving at similar conclusions. Their outline runs as follows: the basic problem of global warming; the ancient history of climate and the components of the climate system; the gathering crisis of extinction and loss of biodiversity; the mendacious industry driven politics of climate-change skepticism; and finally, discussions of what must be done.
Perhaps the most elegant is New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Literary in tone, Kolbert’s book is written in the form of a travelogue. She goes to where the science is being done and meets the people there — Inuit hunters, Princeton Ph.D.s, people who build floating houses in Holland.
The central facts described by Kolbert are deeply troubling. For the last 650,000 years atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) — the main heat trapping gas in the earth’s environment — have hovered at around 250 parts per million. At no point in the pre-industrial era did CO2 concentrations go above 300 parts per million. By 1959 they had reached 316 parts per million. They are now at 378 and are expected to double by mid-century. No one knows what concentration of atmospheric CO2 will push us past the point of no return, the threshold after which we are caught in runaway global warming. Is it 500 parts per million? Is it 600 parts per million, or even 700? No credible scientist thinks it is much higher than that.
In The Weather Makers, Tim Flannery identifies our new climate era using Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen’s concept of the “Anthropocene” — the man-made climate begun 200 years ago with the Industrial Revolution’s use of coal power. Before that came the Holocene, “the 8,000 year long summer,” a period of relative calm, warmth, and stability during which human civilization arose. Flannery describes the Holocene as “without a doubt the crucial event in human history.” One suspects that the Anthropocene might be the next and last crucial event.
