 Don't Miss
More at Powell's
Powell's Q&A, Q&A | June 29, 2009
By Janna Cawrse Esarey
"I fell in love with Crosby, Stills, and Nash's song 'Southern Cross' when I was fifteen. By the time I got to college, 'I'm going to sail around the world someday' was sort of my pickup line."
Continue »
-
 |
$17.95 List price: $26.00
HARDCOVER, USED
Ships in 1 to 3 days
More copies of this ISBN:
This title in other formats:
The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations
by Eugene Linden
|
|
|
|
Synopses & Reviews The Winds of Change places the horrifying carnage unleashed on New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama by Hurricane Katrina in context.
Climate has been humanity's constant, if moody, companion. At times benefactor or tormentor, climate nurtured the first stirrings of civilization and then repeatedly visited ruin on empires and peoples. Eugene Linden reveals a recurring pattern in which civilizations become prosperous and complacent during good weather, only to collapse when climate changes — either through its direct effects, such as floods or drought, or indirect consequences, such as disease, blight, and civil disorder.
The science of climate change is still young, and the interactions of climate with other historical forces are much debated, but the evidence mounts thatclimate loomed over the fate of societies from arctic Greenland to the Fertile Crescent and from the lost cities of the Mayans in Central America to the rain forests of Central Africa. Taking into account the uncertainties in both science and the historical record, Linden explores the evidence indicating that climate has been a serial killer of civilizations. The Winds of Change looks at the present and then to the future to determine whether the accused killer is on the prowl, and what it will do in the future.
The tragedy of New Orleans is but the latest instance in which a region prepared for weather disasters experienced in the past finds itself helpless when nature ups the ante. In the closing chapters, Linden explores why warnings about the dangers of climate change have gone unheeded and what is happening with climate today, and he offers perhaps the most explicit look yet at what a haywire climate might do to us. He shows how even a society prepared to absorb such threshold-crossing events as Katrina, the killer heat wave in Europe in 2003, or the floods in the American Midwest in the 1990s can spiral into precipitous decline should such events intensify and become more frequent.
The Winds of Change places climate change, global warming, and the resulting instability in historical context and sounds an urgent warning for the future. Review: "Linden, who has been writing about the environment for 20 years ( The Future in Plain Sight), is angry that, despite compelling scientific consensus, American politicians aren't facing up to the climate change that is upon us, and he's frustrated that the public isn't forcing them to do so. Such slowpoke acceptance of an inevitability, Linden argues in this articulate polemic, is rooted in the fact that 'it has been our good fortune to prosper...during one of the most benign climate periods' — but one that, if past worldwide weather cycles do portend the future, is fast coming to an end, with severe cultural and political consequences. Linden draws his conclusion from millennia of historical evidence, including the relatively recent Little Ice Age, starting in the 14th century, that wiped out Norse settlers in Greenland; more recently, a fierce El Niño in 1876–1878 precipitated droughts that killed millions, and another in 1997–1998 — the most powerful ever recorded and a 'taste of things to come' — cost the world economy $100 billion. Several chapters explaining the science of climate change will be hard going for lay readers, but the author's passion for the world to comprehend a coming catastrophe helps propel his alarming narrative. B&w illus." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "Three new books on global warming should provide beachgoers with plenty of responses to the question they will likely hear all summer: Hot enough for you? The short answer, according to Elizabeth Kolbert, Eugene Linden and Tim Flannery, is definitely yes. These authors — two magazine journalists and a biologist — explore many of the same branches in the tangled thicket of climate history, science ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) and policy. Each takes a different approach to sorting through the foliage, but all arrive at largely the same conclusion: The Earth is warming, we're causing it, and that is not at all a good thing. The broad outline of the argument is familiar: Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the air keep our planet toasty by letting the sun's energy into the atmosphere and not letting it out again. By clearing forests and especially by burning fossil fuels such as gasoline, oil and coal, humankind is boosting these gases to the sweltering point and beyond. But climate is a wondrously detailed and complex thing, and climate science is full of uncertainties and apparent contradictions that have made for a confused public, politicized policy and some of the most tedious science journalism on the planet. For those who have thus far avoided said media reports, Kolbert's 'Field Notes from a Catastrophe,' written largely as a series of vignettes about scientists at work, provides a reasonably painless tour through the standard themes of climate change reportage. For those who have paid more attention, Linden delivers, among other things, an engaging look behind the scenes of that reportage. But in a refreshing cultural turnabout, it is the scientist, Flannery, not the journalists, who focuses on the big picture, writes in bold language and broad strokes, and makes the most passionate and ultimately convincing plea for action. It's as if having earned his scientific capital, Flannery is now ready to spend it, and in so doing he delivers a tour de force. Here, finally, we have an authoritative, scientifically accurate book on global warming that sparkles with life, clarity and intelligence, rather than settling for being merely important. As a paleontologist and mammalogist, Flannery wanders into and out of his home disciplines in 'The Weather Makers' but manages the material with force, clarity and authority throughout. He covers much of the same ground as Kolbert and Linden — the workings of the global climate system, the history of climate, the melting polar ice caps — and adds particularly well-drawn portraits of a biological world already showing signs of global warming, and of the computer-based artificial world of climate forecasting. In the process, Flannery is often more stylish than the journalists, noting, for example, that 'it is in our lungs that we connect to our Earth's great aerial bloodstream, and in this way the atmosphere inspires us from our first breath to our last.' A touch over-the-top perhaps, but he deploys such passages sparingly and writes lucidly. Flannery is fast emerging as one of our best popularizers of science — a term vaguely insulting in many academic circles for those who somehow manage to convey not just the why of things but the why-we-should-care. The secret in Flannery's case, developed in earlier books such as his ecological histories of North America ('The Eternal Frontier') and his native Australia ('The Future Eaters'), seems to be confident knowledge joined to a storyteller's gifts and a writer's determination to get it just right — a rare combination, and a powerful one when brought to bear on such a monumental topic. The author spends the final third of 'The Weather Makers' assessing the varieties of apocalypse that lie in wait for our warming world and the options we have for keeping them at bay. Despairing of sufficient government action to confront the coming crisis, Flannery advocates what might be called the Smokey Bear approach to fighting climate change: Only you can prevent forest fires, to say nothing of the species loss, widespread drought, resource wars and quite possible collapse of civilizations that Flannery sees resulting from the increasingly manifest changes wrought by human-induced global warming. In laying out a personal program for reducing individual contributions to the atmospheric carbon dioxide pool, he is the only author here to make a direct appeal for urgent, individual action to counteract global warming — and he's quite likely the only one currently generating his own solar electricity to protest the profligate carbon pollution of coal-fired power plants. Kolbert is less forthcoming about her own carbon budget, though she seems otherwise happy to insert herself into a narrative that covers many aspects of the canon of climate change reportage. Here we have the melting Arctic sea ice; the northward shift of England's heat-avoiding butterflies; the ancient Akkadian civilization, established some 4,300 years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and shortly afterward driven off the world stage by severe droughts; and the engineering marvels dreamed up by the Dutch to defend against ever-rising sea levels. And throughout, we have the requisite portraits of dedicated scientists as they earnestly drill into glaciers, sift through desert sands and construct fantastically complicated computer models to make sense of it all. Based on Kolbert's 2005 three-part New Yorker series, the book is competently reported and often nicely written, but for the most part it falls well short of vivid — Kolbert visits interesting places with interesting people but never quite manages to take us along on her travels. Our children may well hate us for leaving them with a messed-up, overheated planet. 'Field Notes from a Catastrophe' reads at times as though written with a nervous glance over the shoulder at that coming generation, as if motivated by a guilty sense that such a book should be written, if only to immunize the author against future recriminations. Kolbert is at her best when she sticks to straight reporting and at her unfortunate worst when she indulges in largely pointless first-person passages. Linden, by contrast, is at his best when he takes the first-person plunge in 'The Winds of Change.' He covered the development of climate science and the debate on global warming during a two-decade career at Time, and his latter chapters on how the advances in global-warming science have filtered through into public opinion and policy are invaluable. 'I've watched with frustration as the story presented to the general public has diverged ever more markedly from the story as it is seen by the scientists studying the phenomenon,' he writes, noting a growing gulf between a public narrative in which climate change is a 'moderated and incremental ... problem for future generations' and the ever-stronger scientific consensus 'that humans have already had dramatic effects on climate, and that climate, when prodded, is prone to violent and extreme swings rather than gently paced changes.' 'The Winds of Change' is largely about climate history, with Linden proposing that climate is on trial as 'a serial killer of colonies and civilizations' and applying significant effort to digging up evidence for the prosecution. (He spends considerable time among the Vikings of Greenland and the classic Mayans of Central America, and he all but bumps into Kolbert in ancient Akkad.) Only recently have reconstructions of past climates achieved enough detail and precision to allow the side-by-side comparison of climate change and human events in history, and Linden's sections on the work of Columbia University paleoclimatologist Peter de Menocal and University of New Mexico Mayanist Lisa Lucero are among the most interesting in the book. Kolbert and Linden both end their books calling for action to curtail carbon dioxide emissions before our current global civilization succumbs to a dramatic climate shift of its own making, and both decry the apparent paralysis gripping the official global efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The degree of scientific certainty is now more than adequate to justify immediate action, says Linden, who attributes the ongoing state of inaction to a synergy between 'cautious scientists interacting with cautious policymakers, all to the delight of naysayers who hold that no action is necessary.' Unfortunately, that interaction is often mediated by journalists, who, when it comes to global warming, might just be the most cautious party of all. Kolbert and Linden are good journalists and far too experienced to fall for the equal-time canard, whereby the voices of the tiny fringe of scientists who dispute that humans are affecting climate are amplified out of all proportion to their relevance. But both display signs of lacking confidence — a tendency to soft-pedal a little here, to get bogged down in technical details there — as if, in bending over backward to appear thorough and fair-minded, the journalists have fallen victim to the softer bias of insecurity. It has become fashionable in certain circles — most prominently the White House — to say that global warming is an important issue and thus worthy of more study. More knowledge is always good, and real gains can come from an intensified effort to monitor the globe's changing climate and ecosystems — to parse out the climate roles of cloud formation and open-ocean ecology, for example. But in this sense, global warming is not much different from evolution — the much-publicized controversies have very little to do with the science. Just as evolution is the central organizing principle of modern biology, so global warming has become the context for all ecology and conservation. Nothing can be fully understood or predicted without taking it into account. As all three authors here make clear, global warming is real, it's happening now, and if the existing research is not joined by real action, real soon, then the best scientists in the world will be able to provide nothing more than a richly detailed diary of our home planet's grim, needless decline. As Kolbert writes, to do nothing 'is not to put off the consequences, but to rush toward them.' Thomas Hayden is a science journalist in Washington, D.C." Reviewed by Thomas Hayden, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "Hurricanes, floods, droughts, melting ice caps — Nature's serving them up at what seems like an ever-increasing clip. Which makes this compelling account of the weather's impact on civilization the book of the moment for all of us. Eugene Linden elegantly weaves history, science, and narrative into a must-read tale of the earth's most powerful forces." Susan Casey, author of The Devil's Teeth Review: "The Winds of Change is fascinating — a tour de force. Linden has accumulated a greater comprehension of paleo-climatic and oceanographic issues than all but a very few scientists. I have nothing but admiration for this book, which is just what we need right now." George Woodwell, founder of the Woods Hole Research Center and former president of the Ecological Society of America Review: "Relatively restrained in tone, and consequently more persuasive by its sobriety, Linden's presentation of scientists' theories on historical climate change will provoke readers concerned about the implications of global warming for modern civilization." Gilbert Taylor, Booklist Review: "[T]his text provides asound orientation to a controversial subject." Kirkus Reviews Review: "...Linden is a good, direct, easy-to-follow writer, and the message of his book couldn't be plainer, or more unsettling." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel About the Author Eugene Linden is the author of seven books and for many years wrote about global environmental issues for Time. He has contributed to the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Fortune, and Slate. Linden has won numerous journalistic awards, including the American Geophysical Union's Walter Sullivan Award. He was named by Yale University in 2001 as a Poynter Fellow in honor of his work in environmental journalism. He lives in Washington, D.C. Table of Contents PrefacePART ONEOpening Arguments 1. A Matter of Emphasis 2. The Deep Past: Climate as Creator 3. Destroyer 4. The First Victim 5. Weapons of Mass Destruction: Disease, Migration, Conflict, and Famine 6. Empty Promises of Water: The Collapse of the Mayans 7. The Little Ice
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780684863528
- Subtitle:
- Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations
- Author:
- Linden, Eugene
- Publisher:
- Simon & Schuster
- Subject:
- Environmental Science
- Subject:
- Earth Sciences
- Subject:
- Weather
- Subject:
- Climatic changes
- Subject:
- Earth Sciences - General
- Subject:
- World - General
- Subject:
- Earth Sciences - Meteorology & Climatology
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Publication Date:
- February 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 302
- Dimensions:
- 9.40x6.44x1.14 in. 1.07 lbs.
- Age Level:
- <P>Five Hundred Years of Climate Chaos<P><center><
Other books you might like
-
-
-
-
-
-
Related Aisles
|
