Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, nature and climate change

"I have a shocking confession to make: I don’t enjoy reading popular books about climate science. Given what I actually do all day, it all feels a bit too much like hard work. I’d rather read something that entertains me or teaches me something I don’t know already. But I think this book is an important one: it largely gets the science right, and it helps give a sense of the scale of the problem. We see graphs of the planet’s average temperature shooting upward, but that doesn’t mean much, intuitively. No one actually experiences the average temperature, and honestly, in winter a few degrees warming sounds like a great idea. So we’ve developed ways of talking about climate change that I think are ineffective at best. I strongly believe we should impose a temporary moratorium on illustrating stories about global warming with stock pictures of Sad Polar Bears. I mean, polar bears are nice to have around (in theory), but few of us will personally feel their loss. “Polar bears are nice to have around (in theory), but few of us will personally feel their loss” What I like about Kolbert’s book is that it gives glimpses into what climate change actually means. She shows us disappearing villages, extinctions, changes in the migration patterns of animals and diseases and humans, and, in a cautionary scenario, the collapse of entire civilisations. There are layers and layers of uncertainty here: what will the physical climate system do? How will that affect ecosystems and the services they provide? How are we going to react? It’s a bleak book – probably too bleak for my taste – but I think it shows the interconnectedness of climate and ecosystems and society well."

"This is a fantastic example of a writer actually going to the scenes that she’s talking about. Most of the books dealing with climate change until that point were written by academics working in the field, who were trying to convince people that climate change was happening and why. Field Notes was refreshing, a trailblazer, in that Elizabeth Kolbert actually went to communities that were being affected, that were on the frontline of climate change, as the book says. She talked to people about how their daily lives, their livelihoods and traditions, were changing. What that did immediately was humanize the issue. Rather than climate change being an abstract notion, something that we might have to deal with one day in the future, you read the book actually caring and realising that people are being affected by it now. “These people really are at the forefront of this global change ” Field Notes is quite a bleak book, actually a lot of the books I’ve chosen are pretty bleak, but it’s the first example that I read where I thought she’s taken a scientific subject, something that climatologists, oceanographers and perhaps ecologists have been talking about, and made it relevant to people. It’s also beautifully written, it’s almost a work of literature. She takes you to these places and it’s very immediate. One of the examples was Banks Island in Canada, in the Arctic Circle. She talks to Inuit people living there, people whose livelihoods are completely changing. They can’t fish as they used to. They have no words to describe the new species that have migrated to their world as it warms, such as the robin. They’re suffering an assault, essentially, on who they are as people. Because once your identity is stripped away by living in a completely different climate—if you can’t wear the clothes you used to wear, if you can’t hunt the animals you used to hunt, if your entire lifestyle changes—then who are you really? These people really are at the forefront of this global change and that’s very memorable."