Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Climate Change - Is Time Running Out?
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
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'A superbly crafted, diligently compressed vision of a world spiralling towards destruction' - Observer
'Kolbert mesmerises with her poetic cadence in this riveting view of the apocalypse already upon us' - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
'The most frightening book I've read this century' - Times Literary Supplement
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Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental classic Field Notes from a Catastrophe first developed out of a groundbreaking, award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker. She expanded it into a still-concise yet richly researched and damning book about climate change: a primer on the greatest challenge facing the world today.
In the years since, the story has continued to develop; the situation has become more dire, even as our understanding of it grows. Now Kolbert returns to the defining book of her career, with new chapters on ocean acidification, the tar sands, and a Danish town that's gone carbon neutral. Field Notes from a Catastrophe remains as necessary as ever, and a must-read for our moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On the burgeoning shelf of cautionary but occasionally alarmist books warning about the consequences of dramatic climate change, Kolbert's calmly persuasive reporting stands out for its sobering clarity. Expanding on a three-part series for the New Yorker, Kolbert (The Prophet of Love) lets facts rather than polemics tell the story: in essence, it's that Earth is now nearly as warm as it has been at any time in the last 420,000 years and is on the precipice of an unprecedented "climate regime, one with which modern humans have had no prior experience." An inexorable increase in the world's average temperature means that butterflies, which typically restrict themselves to well-defined climate zones, are now flitting where they've never been found before; that nearly every major glacier in the world is melting rapidly; and that the prescient Dutch are already preparing to let rising oceans reclaim some of their land. In her most pointed chapter, Kolbert chides the U.S. for refusing to sign on to the Kyoto Accord. In her most upbeat chapter, Kolbert singles out Burlington, Vt., for its impressive energy-saving campaign, which ought to be a model for the rest of the nation just as this unbiased overview is a model for writing about an urgent environmental crisis.
