Climate change books coming thick and fast

The New York Times has made available the first chapter of Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book on global warming, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Haven’t read the book, so I can’t make a recommendation, but it’s title suggests that it could be the feel-good crossover hit that finally breaks global warming into the mainstream discourse.

The Times has reviewed the book twice recently, once in the Arts section, and again in the Sunday book section, alongside a review of Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, whose first chapter is also available online.

Both books receive high marks for breaking down maddeningly complex scientific and political questions into digestible prose.

One of the few quibbles the reviewer of The Weather Makers has is with the author’s use of the term “Gaia-cide” — as in Mother Nature slaughter — to describe our present environmental course.

…this is not a useful way to think about global warming; it makes no sense to separate ourselves from nature this way. Long before Henry Ford fired up his first Model T, the climate changed drastically many times, and living things often played a major role in those changes.

Reading the first chapter of Kolbert’s book suggests another reason why Gaia-cide is an inappropriate term. After all, it isn’t really possible to kill the Earth. We can merely make it uninhabitable by humans.