A Really Long Heat Wave (XMas Science Books, Part I)

In the latest issue of the American Prospect magazine, I've got a lengthy, essay-style review of two recent books on global warming: The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing The Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate, by David Archer of RealClimate.org and the University of Chicago; and Forecast: The Consequences Of Climate Change, From The Amazon To The Arctic, From Darfur To Napa Valley, by Stephan Faris of the Atlantic.

You can't read the full review sans subscription, but it opens like this:

"Timescale" is a word one hears regularly from climate scientists like the University of Chicago's David Archer and rarely if ever from journalists like Stephan Faris. Reporters -- and I am one of them -- talk of time spans, time frames, time lines, and, of course, deadlines. But "timescale" conjures up an expanse of time so immense -- not just decades or centuries but millennia and beyond -- that it is alien to everyday human concerns and news media demands. Journalism is episodic and event-driven, always in search of the dramatic and the new. Global warming repeatedly fails that standard. A reporter cannot say "it happened today" of a phenomenon that is slow moving, incremental, and usually only detectable through statistical analysis.

And thus the disconnect that is one source of the unfolding tragedy of our time. As Archer notes in The Long Thaw, global warming could change the planet for the next 100,000 years, which is how long it may take for igneous rocks to "breathe" back in all the carbon dioxide we've released over just a few centuries. Scientists say the Holocene period of the earth's history is giving way to the Anthropocene -- we human beings are now driving the planet, recklessly pushing it to unimaginable disaster. But, hey, it's still not pressing; there's always some breaking news development with more apparent urgency.

The latest breaking issue that's more pressing than global warming is of course the economy. It has already made it dramatically harder for the Obama team to deal with the problem than would have otherwise been the case, and it may well be driving less media attention to climate as well.

But it's always something, as the problem worsens and worsens. In this media context, you pretty much have to turn to books if you really, really want to know something about climate--and in this context, both selections are excellent, and also very different.

Stephan Faris's Forecast is a journalistic take on global warming, the kind of book I might have liked to write myself with a better travel budget. It's colorful, writerly, dispatched from the front lines. The key theme: In less stable parts of the world, global warming is the straw that breaks the camel's back. It can tip fragile societies over the edge. And that's already happening.

David Archer's The Long Thaw, in contrast, is a scientist's take on global warming in its fully geologic context. I've never seen the planet's climate history explained so sweepingly and lucidly, arcing back deep into past, and looking out distantly to the almost unrecognizable future. To be sure, this is a scientist's book, and not always entirely user friendly--it has a few equations in it. But to get a true sense of global warming's magnitude, this is the place to go.

So I recommend both books for Xmas--and in the coming days, I'll be posting a few more science book recommendations. It's extremely important for people who read, and value reading, to be buying books during this trying economic time--one of tumult for the book industry and also for writers. They/we need your support!

[Again, you can check out my full review of these books here, if you have a subscription.]