was looking for a grim tale about the future of the world from climate change, Not tips on how to prevent it, because I don't think we're going to "prevent" or "mitigate," I think we're going to adapt, In short, I wanted a factfueled prophecy,
That's essentially what this book is a dark, very dark, nightmare of the nearfuture interspersed with Hertsgaard's anxieties about his young daughter's future, He travels the world inspecting the damage wrought by the acidification of the ocean, the, uh, saltification of coastal farms, and the continuing destruction of our civilization via bigger natural disasters and general governmental reluctance.
The book doesn't just cover indepth trends in major U, S. cities, but also the effects of climate change in places like China and Bangladesh,
Rather than solutions, Hertsgaard whimsically proposes toward the end of the book that there's still time to change things, But his narrative leaves little doubt that it's not what he believes, just what he felt compelled to write, I thought this was a very good book, “Hot” Living through the next fifty years on Earth By Mark Hertsgaard well when reviewing this book let me go to the last chapter and answer his question
Epilogue: Chiara in the Year
Frodo: I wish that none of this had ever happened.
Gandolf: Of course you do, But that is not for you to decide, All you have to do is decide what to do with the time you have been given,
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Ive arranged for you to receive this letter along with a copy of this book on your fifteenth birthday I wonder what kind of birthday you are having in the year.
Dear Dad
Thank you for the book and for all your love and support Im very blessed to be your daughter, That said, you had a few things wrong and a whole lot of things correct, You didnt see the election of Donald Trump coming and
for that Im glad for these past four years have been horrible years in the fight against Climate Change and its clear that this is another lost decade, but you also didnt see this virus coming.
Our changing climate impacted all species and infections Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue, With sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases being zoonotic meaning they originated in animals, This COVIDappears to be at first glance a possible climate related mutation and it will kill thousands and thousands of people and has changed our world as nothing else has in my lifetime at least.
That said, it has helped the environment, We the world needed to stop polluting immediately but politically it couldnt be done, too many people are making too much money, no incentive to change and certainly no incentive to make radical changes, well all that just changed and the air is cleaner the earth its still very early but The earth is starting to recover.
In a way this might be the miracle we were hoping for but as the old saying goes careful what you pray for, So my birthday well its being done at home this year, and my wish and hope is that next year we can have it at my favorite restaurant or for that matter any public place, and that life somehow returns to a normal, much less fossilfuel based world, time will tell.
Now that mother nature has forced us in the direction you said we needed to take I hope that human nature keeps us on this path of recovery so that future birthday my be celebrated in hope and not in isolation and endless crisis.
I heard a lot of really good things about this book, The biggest draw for me: reviews that called it serious and factual but optomistic, I heard interviews where the author himself claims to keep an optomistic tone throughout the book and the interviewer said that the book offers ways that the reader can DO SOMETHING rather than just a doomsday approach.
Those rumors and reviews could not have been more wrong, This book was all doomsday and no optomism, As someone who really really wants to have children in the nextyears, this book left me feeling like having kids in this world would make me an awful person.
I do not care to spend hours of my time reading a book that tells me "everything sucks and there is absolutely nothing you can do, " I only give it two because there was a lot of interesting information but no solutions :/ Update, post hurricane Sandy, autumn:
Mark Hertsgaard wrote an essay for The Nation: sitelink Hurricane Sandy as Greek Tragedy which provides yet more evidence of our world's slowmotion train wreck.
The name of the hurricane provides the most poignant and realistic note:
Sandy is short for Cassandra, the Greek mythological figure who epitomizes tragedy, The gods gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy depending on which version of the story one prefers, she could either see or smell the future, But with this gift also came a curse: Cassandras warnings about future disasters were fated to be ignored, That is the essence of this tragedy: to know that a given course of action will lead to disaster but to pursue it nevertheless,Hertsgaard states that “There are signs of hope” but his threshold must be abysmally low, Does he really believe that “Especially in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there is no reason to continue disregarding scientists warnings about where our current path leads” Of course, there are plenty of reasons, and he knows what they are.
There is plenty of money behind the push to deny this, and huge portions of the American demos have passively chosen to believe there is a controversy, either because the issue is tied strongly to their other ideological positions, or because it is more convenient to be too busy to worry about such longterm problems.
Hertsgaard again has the wrong attitude and the wrong tone of voice, This message might be a bit more persuasive if it were delivered in tones of a thundering Mosaic condemnation from Mount Sinai, Because he leavens his message with unwarranted optimism, his message and the tragedy are both left easy to ignore,
Back to my original review
Mark Hertsgaards book covers a lot of ground, and Id argue that in the coming years there is no more important topic that anyone could study.
This book is a decent start, but in the end I was disappointed primarily because he was too optimistic,
All of the accumulated evidence is that we are so far from any significant mitigation of global warming that it as if someone is writing the script for a very black comedy of errors.
But Hersgaard ends in an upbeat mood, asserting that well do this, because well, because we have to, The alternative is too horrendous to contemplate,
The problem with that prognosis is twofold, First, even people that believe global warming is taking place seldom have examined how very nasty the latter half of the twentieth century will probably be, Sure, some cautionary descriptions have floated around, but even picking a single example hides the panoramic sweep of the changes and the trauma, Much like looking at the aftermath of a hurricane or tsunami through a telescope, you only examine details by losing the ability to see everything else,
Second, collective action is naturally slow in coming when the costs of change will undoubtedly be high, Deniers have been criminal in making things worse by sowing doubt when there really is very little doubt, A reasonable prediction is that people wont agree on the need for real action until much later in the game, A few hundred deaths from a clutch of tornadoes here, a few billion dollars in damage from hurricanes there, climbing food scarcity due to floods here and droughts there it will all get shrugged off as just plain bad luck for another decade or more.
And by that time
Hertsgaard has a very wellchosen framing narrative here although, as other reviewers have noted he gets too bathetic, especially towards the end of the book.
He has recently become a father, and there is some cognitive dissonance between the horror story he keeps finding as he has researched this book, and the warm and happy feelings he has when he looks at his young daughter.
Hes right to worry. In her anticipated lifespan she could easily witness changes that dramatically reduce any expectation she has for a pleasant life,
Its too bad that this book hasnt told the bad side of that story, Many pages were devoted to how, for example, a few tiny parts of the United States and other wealthy countries have made baby steps towards adaptation, And more pages turn to how difficult it is to prepare, But while he notes out that “floods kill thousands, drought can kill millions,” but he doesnt go much deeper, Drought is potentially a problem in so many parts of the world that he should probably warn about tens of millions of deaths, And once people start seeing that, do we really expect them to peacefully beg for help Water wars have been a hot topic of study in international relations for many years now where are the interviews regarding that With climate change triggering food scarcity, these problems are likely to cascade upon one another.
The books single instance of humor is inadequately dark: “You know the joke, dont you Under climate change the future is definitely going to be wetter, Or drier. Unless its both. ”
I think the only honest conclusion is that the future is definitely going to be wetter, drier and much deadlier,
Also see the New York Times review, sitelinkPoisoning the Well, February,,
Image from Queenslandflood
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Image from Thailand'sflood
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Image from Hurricane Sandy
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I guess I like the juxtaposition of one of the causes of climate change and one of the effects.
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