The Last Winter
The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
One man’s “curiously thrilling joyride” of travelogue, history, and climatology, across a planet on the brink of cataclysmic transformation (Donovan Hohn).
As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the US alone, snow cover has been reduced by 15-30%. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes.
In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and adventure-filled book, journalist Porter Fox travels along the edge of the Northern Hemisphere's snow line to track the scope of this drastic change, and how it will literally change everything—from rapid sea level rise, to fresh water scarcity for two billion people, to massive greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, and a half dozen climate tipping points that could very well spell the end of our world.
This original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys—each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox's own narrative of growing up on a remote island in Northern Maine.
Timely, atmospheric, and expertly investigated, The Last Winter will showcase a shocking and unexpected casualty of climate change—that may well set off its own unstoppable warming cycle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fox (Northland), editor of the literary journal Nowhere, spotlights a warming world in this moving travelogue about snowy places and the people who inhabit them. Decrying global warming's effect on glacier ice, snow terrain, and high-altitude snowpacks, Fox pals around with scientists who are studying how Earth's ice, snow, and winters "affect and even control" the planet's natural systems. In "interviews, revelations, confessions, treks, bonfires, meals, and contemplative road trips," Fox tries to wrap his head around a world without winter, and cites grave conditions, such as the prediction that "most will be gone in the next century." He visits Juneau, Alaska, to meet with glaciologists studying the ice ages; goes to Corvara, Italy, to follow along with mountaineers enduring ever warmer tours through the Alps; and heads to Kulusuk, Greenland, to observe how the Inuit cope with ice loss as glaciers slide into the sea "faster than snowfall could replenish them." Perilous journeys on skis and by dog sled give this the feel of a rollicking adventure story: "Each driver steered this slightly controlled state of entropy not from the back of the sled, where the brake is, but up front, setting up exciting and often terrifying driving-without-brakes situations." Environmentalists will find much to savor in this exciting yet distressing tale.
