Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Climate Change - Is Time Running Out? - Hardcover

'The hard, cold, sobering facts about global warming and its effects on the environment that sustains us. Kolbert's "Field Notes from a Catstrophe" is nothing less than a "Silent Spring" for our time' T.C. Boyle 'A riveting view of the apocalypse already upon us. Kolbert mesmerizes with her poetic cadence as she closes the coffin on the arguments of the global warming skeptics' Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 'Reading Field Notes during the 2005 hurricane season is what it must have been like to read Silent Spring in the 1960s. When you put down this book, you'll see the world through different eyes' Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind 'Reporters talk about the trial of the decade or the storm of the century. But for the planet we live on, the changes now unfolding are of a kind and scale that have not been seen in thousands of years--not since the retreat of the last ice age. In Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert gives us a clear, succinct, and invaluable report from the front. Even if you have followed the story for years, you will want to read it. And if you know anyone who still does not understand the reality and the scale of global warming, you will want to give them this book' Jonathan Weiner, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Beak of the Finch

In writing that is both clear and unbiased, Kolbert - an acclaimed New Yorker journalist - approaches global warming from every angle. She travels to the Arctic, the North of England, Holland and Puerto Rico, interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science and the studies, draws frightening parallels to lost ancient civilizations, unpacks the politics, and presents the personal tales of those who are being affected most - the people who make their homes near the poles and, in an eerie foreshadowing, are watching their worlds disappear. Scientists have been warning the world since the late 1970s that the build-up of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere threatens to melt the polar ice sheets and irreversibly change our climate. With little done since then to alter this dangerous course, now is the moment for all the countries in the world, but perhaps especially the USA, to face up to the realities of global warming and to secure our future. By the end of the century, the world will probably be hotter than it's been in the last two million years, and the sweeping consequences of this change will determine the future of life on earth for generations to come. Field Notes from a Catastrophe brings the environment into the consciousness of the reader and asks what, if anything, can be done, and how we can save our planet.