NYT Book Review: "Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid"

[gristy]

The New York Times comments on several new books about global warming. It seems to me that Bush's "war" against terrorism is putting global warming so far down the priority list nothing is going to get done until Kerry gets in. One more reason Kerry has GOT to win.

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: May 30, 2004

At least for the moment, "The Day After Tomorrow" -- 20th Century Fox's new movie about catastrophic climate change -- has reawakened public anxiety over global warming and broken through the thick crust of American denial. Unfortunately, the movie does for climatology only what "Independence Day," also directed by Roland Emmerich, did for cosmology. It delivers summer blockbuster thrills and the kind of hyperbole -- a tidal wave pounding through Manhattan -- that makes the whole problem easy for skeptics to dismiss. All across the country, "The Day After Tomorrow" has started debates the movie itself cannot resolve -- debates, all too often, between the prejudiced and the ill informed.

<snip>
They range from anecdotal, first-person accounts of vanishing Peruvian glaciers and Pacific islands slipping beneath a rising ocean, like Mark Lynas's High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (Picador, paper, $14), to profoundly sobering studies, like James Gustave Speth's Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (Yale University, $24) . For the most part, these books don't advance new arguments, because the arguments essentially haven't changed. As Speth writes, "Our use of fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- together with deforestation have increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping 'greenhouse' gas . . . and thus begun the process of man-made climate change.'' This is not news. According to Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows, the authors of the updated Limits to Growth (Chelsea Green, cloth, $35; paper, $22.50), the ecological burden of humanity had already outstripped the carrying capacity of the earth two decades ago -- as the first edition of this book, originally published in 1972, warned it would.

more: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/books/review/30KLINKEN.html?pagewanted=all&position=

[mike_c]

1. this is only one of several reasons why we need leadership...

...that will give higher priority to long term environmental concerns than to short term economic issues. It's time to put the planet before the profit!