Book review: Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, by Mark Hertsgaard

Hot:  Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, by Mark Hertsgaard, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2011

This book should be required reading for students and teachers of science, history, geography, politics, economics and journalism (and probably more).  Mark Hertsgaard goes directly to many sources of vital information about the impacts of climate change today and in the near future—places like Bangladesh, Shanghai, the Sahel in Africa, New Orleans, Florida, California, the Midwest . . .the world is in serious danger and Hertsgaard does not mince words.  We are heading for a serious of climate catastrophes—droughts, floods, heat waves, hurricanes that ultimately threaten extinction of humanity if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.

For example, he reports that the UK government’s Meterological office has warned that current global emissions would lead to a temperature rise of 4⁰ C (7⁰ F) by 2070.  This “would create planetary conditions all but certain to end civilization as we know it, and leave many millions of people dead. . .snowpacks would be doomed, crashing water supplies in many places, including California.  Worse, positive feedbacks could make runaway global warming all but inevitable, for 4⁰ C would cause the tundra to thaw and the Amazon to burn.”

Hertsgaard argues that we need to “avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable”, i.e. we need to recognize that some changes—e.g. 3 feet of sea level rise—are already inevitable, and we need to plan for those.  At the same time we need to break the stranglehold that oil, coal, and gas industries have on our political institutions to choose renewable alternatives to fossil fuels.

One weakness is that he doesn’t mention electric cars as part of the solution, although he does frequently cite the need for solar energy.  But that flaw is minor compared to the great amount of information in this well written book.