These books came to my attention as two of the ‘best environmental books of 2006′ according to Living on Earth. Both are solid (which means, these days: worrisome) reviews of many of the existing symptoms of anthropogenic global warming. Neither point their way to solutions, let alone the political feasibility of any of those solutions.
Elizabeth Kolbert, currently on the staff of the New Yorker and previously of the New York Times, reviews the development of global warming science (Tyndall and Ahrennius, in particular), and current atmospheric (James Hansen) and permafrost (Vladmir Romanovsky) science. She assembles some field notes concerning melting Arctic ice, thawing Siberian, Greenland, and Alaskan permafrost, and current changes in Iceland and elsewhere. She discusses how non-athropogenic climate change wiped out great verdant civilizations in the place that is today’s middle east, how the Dutch already deal with rising waters (or, as the case may be, sinking land), how some scientists and economists (in particular, Princeton’s Robert Socolow) are struggling to develop an approach to minimizing carbon emissions, and how America’s dismissal of the Kyoto protocol is both understandable and bafflingly self-defeating.

I read her book as if she is somewhat amazed onlooker. As the title of the book underscores, she is doing something akin to anthropology or nature writing: watching a process unfold and describing several of its aspects. In this case, the unfolding process is a catastrophe. She does not moralize, does not directly engage you and say “Do something about it, dammit!”, and does not draw conclusions about humanity’s status as, say, an infection on Gaia (Lovelock) or a horribly myopic misfit.

Tim Flannery is an Australian journalist. His book is much more wide-ranging than Kolbert’s (well, it is longer, and Flannery is not as precise and artful a writer as Kolbert). For that reason, reading this book will drill quite a bit of climate information into you. Flannery has researched the historical record, and has worked very hard to understand the ways the carbon cycle has varied through the millenia. (After reading this book, as well as “Collapse” by Jared Diamond, it becomes very clear that whether humans are causing climate change or not, a changing climate is extraordinarily difficult for societies to deal with.)

One interesting touch is that Flannery tries to imagine some political changes which global warming might cause. At one point, he discusses an “Orwellian nightmare”: “if we delay action to combat the climate crisis, the carbon dictatorship may become essential for our survival.” (p. 294) This kind of reflection is extremely useful, if only to highlight what a serious food shortage, coupled with rising oceans, might do to the body politic. Since this crisis is on a global scale, only global solutions could actually make a dent.

After reading these books, I’m left with at least this question. Does it really matter if humans are causing global warming? (I’m positive we are, but whether we are or not, the record shows that the temperature is rising, permafrost is thawing, and ice is melting, all of which creates a positive feedback loop.) The geological record shows that the earth’s climate has shifted around quite a bit in the past several dozen million years, with catastrophic results for many species. What if we are more like the Vikings who settled Greenland (described by Jared Diamond), trying to figure out what we’ve done to make the climate change, whereas what we need most to do is see clearly what is happening around us and adapt to it?

The more we insist that humans have caused all aspects of global warming, the more powerful that makes us feel. We feel we have the means to fix the problem, since we caused the problem. But what if humans (in particular, during the carbon binge of the last 200 years) have precipitated climate change, but are completely unable to do anything but adjust to the ride once it starts happening?