The Coming Meltdown

Book review

The year 2005 has been the hottest year on record for the planet, hotter than 1998, 2002, 2004, and 2003. More importantly, perhaps, this has been the autumn when the planet has shown more clearly than before just what that extra heat means. Consider just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the last three months:

.. It’s not, of course, that America could in two decades have prevented global warming. But we could have begun taking the steps to keep it from spinning entirely out of control, steps that grow ever more difficult to take with each passing season. The books under review, though neither deals directly with the politics of global warming, help us understand some of the reasons why we’ve so far done so little.

A book review of:

-Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World’s Highest Mountains
by Mark Bowen

Henry Holt, 463 pp., $30.00

and

-Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World’s Environmental Hotspots
by Alanna Mitchell

University of Chicago Press, 239 pp., $25.00

from The New York Review of Books