Subtitled “Climate Change from A to Z”
Illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook
(Ten Speed Press, 159pp, c2023, published March 2024) <Amazon>
This is a book I bought on the basis of the author’s name (I quite admired her book of a decade ago, THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, reviewed here) without quite realizing that it isn’t a book of essays so much as a book of illustrations with short essay accompaniments; a book for casual readers, or perhaps for young adults. As the subtitle says, the book outlines issues concerning climate change in 26 topics, from A to Z.
I sat down to read this looking for something light, as I was coming down with a cold, yet wondered about if given the kind of book it is, how much will I really learn that’s new? Yet curious to find out what her hope for optimism, if any?
Each essay is half a page, or a full page or two, or even three pages. With a couple full-page illustrations for each, and a 2-page break between each letter. That said, Kolbert rather cleverly manages to choose topics for each letter that make the book a kind of narrative.
So: A is for Arrhenius. A Swedish scientist who first constructed a climate change model, in 1895, predicting that the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise temperatures by three or four degrees C… over 3000 years.
B is for Blah Blah Blah, the way political leaders and Greta Thunberg keep talking, and sound optimistic, yet virtually nothing has gotten done. C is for Capitalism, essentially why nothing has gotten done. D is for Despair, which is unproductive, and a sin.
There are stories about some specific efforts to combat dependence on fossil fuels. F is for Flight, about an electric airplane called Alia. G is for Green Concrete, made without cement, which takes a lot of energy to make, usually from coal.
H is for Hope, as there are plenty of similar efforts. J is for the Jobs those efforts could create. Leapfrogging is how India, for example, might jump from having very few phones in 1989 to everyone having cellphones now, jumping over the phase of everyone having landlines, and how similar advances might occur.
And yet. O is for Objections, how the optimistic forecasts make unreliable assumptions, ignoring feasibility limits. R is for Republicans, implicated only by noting that virtually no Republican voters in a 2022 poll considered climate change an important problem facing the nation.
X is for Xenophobia, whereby the costs of climate change may be borne by those who have contributed least to the problem — e.g. tiny Pacific islands, and Bangladesh. And how people from such affected areas will try to migrate, and be despised wherever they go, vilified by right-wing politicians, creating a feedback loop of racism and xenophobia. Will the world come together, or will nationalism and fear intensify?
Z is for Zero. The author tours Hoover Dam, built with a promise of unlimited power. But the area has been in drought since 1998; the water level is low, and a bathtub ring is visible on the canyon walls. And tour guides don’t want to talk about it. And so (despite the title of the book) the author ends thus:
Climate change isn’t a problem that can be solved by summoning the “will.” It isn’t a problem that can be “fixed” or “conquered,” thought these words are often used. It isn’t going to have a happy ending, or a win-win ending, or, on a human timescale, any ending at all. Whatever we might want to believe about our future, there are limits, and we are up against them.
The short ‘further reading’ pages include titles in my library (some of which I’ve read) by Smil, Bjornerud, McKibben, Gates, Oreskes & Conway, and Wallace-Wells. The book echoes the grim tone of Wallace-Wells: it won’t be getting better any time soon; we are living in a time of irreversible change.
So: worth reading? Sure, in part as a refresher on some of the basic parameters of the climate change problem, and in part as a reminder of the seriousness of a problem we too often push to the back of our attentions. (Of course, at the moment, Trump and his minions are making everything worse.)
