Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Elizabeth Kolbert: Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Bloomsbury (March 7, 2006). ISBN:1596911255

Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert suggests the Earth is as warm as it has been at any time in the last 400,000 years. 

It echoes Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, another book that began life as an article in the New Yorker magazine. It begins in a similar way, with a personal account of a local environmental disaster. This time itis the story of the Inuit people who lost their town and livelihood due to the advance of Global Warming. 

The permafrost is melting in Fairbanks, Alaska, and huge holes are opening up under houses. Butterfly species have moved to the cooler north. 

Kolbert has interviewed almost every major researcher studying global warming, and provides a comprehensive review of scientific evidence and political failings. This makes the book an authoritative account, even though Kolbert is not a researcher herself. She is a leading journalist, which make the book intensely readable.

• The devil is in the detail, and here the detail is terrifying. 

Many other books covering global warming have appeared, including The Winds of Change, by Eugene Linden, The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery and The End of Nature by Bill McKibben. But none have had a political impact. Perhaps Field Notes will also fail to make a movement when activists are so thin on the ground. But Kolbert's New Yorker articles really struck a chord with many non-scientists, who found it a comprehensible account of what was happening and why we must act. 

Highlights:

• Elizabeth Kolbert discusses Global Warming with the actual scientists who have discovered that almost all the world's major glaciers are now rapidly melting.
• Field Notes from a Catastrophe gives a full account of reasons for the U.S. refusal to sign the Kyoto Accord.