Reading List: Global Warming Guides

The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook (2007, Rodale, $14.95) by David de Rothschild. To purchase this book, visit our online bookstore.

I checked the thermometer just after finishing David de Rothschild's quirky The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook. The temperature read 64 degrees F—and it's the last week of July. On days like this, when 90 degrees is about average, it's hard to imagine that, globally, temperatures are soaring, icecaps are melting and civilization as a whole is facing imminent threats because of our demand for greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels.

But, fortunately, de Rothschild's book, which was published in conjunction with the Live Earth concerts earlier this month, is just colorful enough to keep me and billions of others from getting too complacent, despite the unseasonably cool weather. He tackles the looming dawn of a climate-changed age with the same offbeat flair you'd expect from a man who sits shirtless in the North Pole or who's building a boat out of garbage and then sailing it to the swirling vortex of plastic in the North Pacific. Peppered with somewhat bizarre solutions, e.g. move to Stockholm because it's Europe's most climate-forward forward city or invent the antidote to climate change, the rest of his 77 tips are admirably practical, albeit slightly ambitious: build a straw-bale home, install geothermal heating (all your really doing is digging a big hole, right?), ride the train (oh, if Amtrak could miraculously triple their service routes overnight so it wouldn't take two days, one-way, to visit my relatives).

Environmentalism certainly needs personality to keep people engaged, interested and actively involved, and de Rothschild is full of it. One of National Geographic Society's Emerging Explorers, he's devoted a great deal of effort to educating people about protecting nature through his wild adventures, sleeping under volcanoes and getting chased by polar bears, sort of an environmental equivalent to the Crocodile Hunter. His prior efforts, documented regularly on his web site www.adventureecology.com, make this practical guide to living a more eco-friendly life so...ordinary. Not to be too stiff-shirted, though, he does devote the last ten tips of his book to the worst-case scenario. If all else fails, he suggests, buy a camel or build a floating house or colonize space or, simply, evolve into a human who can withstand the heat. I guess I'd better get started on that...

—Emily Main

The Rough Guide to Climate Change (Rough Guides, 2006, $16.99) by Robert Henson.
To purchase this book, visit our online book store.

The title says "climate change" but Robert Henson’s work is definitely a book about global heating, with emphasis not only on our role in warming the planet but on what it’s doing to us already.  Even if no individual weather event can be blamed  on global warming, Henson makes no bones about the threat posed, paying attention to heat waves in Chicago and particularly the disastrous temperatures in the summer of 2003 that killed 20,000 in Europe.  A foreward by James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, drives the point home: “Earth is not the Goldilocks planet of the solar system sitting at the right place for life. It was in this favorable state some two billion years ago, but now our planet has to work, against ever increasing heat from the Sun, to keep itself habitable.  We have chosen the worst of times to add to its difficulties.”

Known for their practical and down-to-earth travel guides, Rough Guides have ventured into new territory here. The result is a somewhat disconnected, but fascinating, series of vignettes and essays covering the basics of climate change and its effects worldwide, before turning to the science behind it and proposed solutions. One might wish Henson had pushed the guide idea a little further, perhaps borrowing some of the grim humor of Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide (Three Rivers Press, 2003, $13.95), if only to lighten up the proceedings. Unlike Elizabeth Kolbert’s superb Field Notes from A Catastrophe, Henson’s work isn’t leavened with anecdote or threaded with narrative.  Like a travel book, this isn’t to be read cover-to-cover. Instead, readers should look for the highlights and landmarks, such as the melting Arctic, the fate of Tuvalu in the Pacific or the science of contrails. Sidebars and boxes throughout provide fascinating glimpses of the science and history of climate studies, not to mention swipes at creation studies and media gaffes by a well known climatologist.

As with any book on the topic, events are moving so quickly that some of the information presented is already out of date. Henson mentions China passing the US in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, but this June the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency announced that China had already beat US carbon dioxide emissions in 2006. Nonetheless, The Rough Guide to Climate Change makes for a handy reference, particularly in its presentation of climate science, for all of those hoping to fathom what’s happening to the world around them.

—P. W. McRandle