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by Craig Lawrence
This past summer I decided to learn about
global warming. I knew it was a big topic, and that I would have to select my
books carefully, but I wasn’t prepared for my Amazon search result: I found
31,782 books! I bravely printed up the first 14 pages and looked over 142
titles, finding everything from coffee table picture books, to collections of
scientific proceedings, to how to make money from global warming, to how the
bible has predicted it all. Overwhelmed, I went to the Greensboro Library
catalogue and found an almost manageable 64 titles, and at Barnes and Noble
found 34 books in stock. I bought some, borrowed others, and started my reading.
Here are the highlights.
Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was my introduction into the world of
global warming. So Gore’s book with the same name was my starting point, and in
reading it I relived the anger, amazement and hope that I felt when I walked out
of the movie. But, unlike the movie, the book gave me time to let the message
soak in, and made me realize that I needed to know more.
One realization was that I really didn’t understand the hard science behind it
all, so, with some embarrassment, I next read the The Complete Idiot’s Guide to
Global Warming by Mark Tennesen. I would recommend this book for anyone who has
my aversion for chemistry, physics and mathematics. He holds your hand the
entire way, and gives you just enough science so that you can move on.
Then I dove deeper. I read Mark Lynas’ Six Degrees, an excruciating book of how
climate will change, degree by degree, based on evidence taken from tens of
thousands of scientific articles. With that baptism, I read With Speed and
Violence by Fred Pearce, a book that takes you deep into real world evidence
that the climate is changing rapidly, right now. This book connects the dots of
climate change from around the world, and when he’s done, the picture he draws
is sobering.
Gary Braasch, in Earth Under Fire, takes you to many of the places described in
Pearce’s book, and he returns with harrowing pictures of a changing world. The
book covers 33 impacts from global warming, and each section is written by an
expert in the area and is illustrated by Braasch’s stunning photographs.
Then I came to a book like none I’d ever read before: Under a Green Sky by Peter
Ward, a paleontologist at the University of Washington. It is part
paleontological history, part geological travelogue, but mostly a mystery tale
of past extinctions. Except for the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, Ward
concludes that every major extinction involved climate change triggered by an
increase in atmospheric CO2.
There are hopeful books. David Steinman’s Safe Trip to Eden takes you on a road
trip around the world exploring what many brilliant and determined people are
doing to alter the course of global warming. In Apollo’s Fire Jay Inslee uses
the Apollo mission to the moon as an inspiration for us to transform our carbon
based economy. The most practical, wide-ranging book I found on what steps each
of us can take in our lives to reduce our carbon use is Jeffery Langholz’s You
Can Prevent Global Warming (And Save Money). He covers everything from how to
drive your car to save gas, to how to buy a fax machine that saves electricity.
For the big fix, read Wally Broecker’s book, Fixing Climate, which ends
promoting a technology that would position carbon sweeping machines around the
world to scrub millions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.
If, after reading about global warming, you really have to let others know about
it, pick up Bill McKibben’s book Fight Global Warming Now. McKibben is credited
with writing the first book on global warming, The End of Nature, in 1989, and
in this later book he gives step by step instructions on how organize
grass-roots campaigns to fight it.
One message in every book is that the potential for serious, perhaps catastrophe
changes in climate, increases every day that we don’t reduce our emissions of
green house gases. How this message, this inconvenient truth, has been actively
suppressed by our government is told by Mark Bowen, in his book, Censoring
Science. Bowen tells the story of Dr. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who wrote
in 1981 that the impacts of climate change would be felt as early as 1990, and
how Dick Cheney and others in Bush’s administration systematically suppressed
Hansen’s message and diverted attention away from it.
However, Amazon’s 31,872 online titles, Greensboro Library’s catalogue of 64
titles, and Barnes and Nobles 34 books, is ample evidence that Cheney could not
suppress the popular media. The information we need is out there.
But if you can only read one book, which one should it be? Choose The Hot Topic
by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King. Walker and King know the subject so
well, and write so well, that The Hot Topic is a brilliantly clear and concise
book about a subject that is too often overwhelming. King, previously the United
Kingdom’s chief scientific advisor, has been a leader in developing strategies,
such as flood control, to combat the climate changes that are already in the
pipeline because of past emissions. He also is a leader in developing low carbon
sources of energy. The book ends with a positive message, shown as four small
squares on each of the world’s continents. If we could efficiently capture the
solar energy in each of these relatively small areas, we could power the world
with clean energy.
This may not have been an enjoyable stack of books to read this summer, but it
was a summer education that I will never forget.
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