I would have given this set of feature stories on climate change 5 stars, except it was too short and skimpy on the details. Time after time, she brings up topics that I'd really like to know more about, then just skims over them. Nevertheless, I think it's an important book. ( )

It's a good introduction to the topic of global warming, but we shouldn't be needing just an introduction at this point. The urgency and immediacy of Kolbert's "field notes" (as opposed to lab reports) counter skeptics' claims that this problem was made up by simulation models. ( )

Long known for her insightful and thought-provoking political journalism, author Elizabeth
Kolbert now tackles the controversial and increasingly urgent subject of global warming. In
what began as groundbreaking three-part series in the New Yorker, for which she won a
National Magazine Award in 2006, Kolbert cuts through the competing rhetoric and political
agendas to elucidate for Americans what is really going on with the global environment and
asks what, if anything, can be done to save our planet. Now updated and with a new afterword,
Field Notes from a Catastrophe is the book to read on the defining issue and greatest challenge
of our times. --from Amazon.com

`Field Notes From a Catastrophe' is Elizabeth Kolbert's masterpiece of conciseness and clarity explaining current climate change science and the political obstacles (read the US, Republicans, and Bush Administration in ascending order) to getting serious about attacking the problem. Originally published in 2005, the paperback version has an afterword written in 2006.

Kolbert takes a journalist's approach to explaining the climate change phenomenon (the book began as a series in the New Yorker). She takes the reader to Shishmaref, Alaska an island village rapidly becoming an untenable place to live due to climate-induced sea ice changes, to the North Slope, to the great Greenland ice shield and she brings the story down to a human scale.

Kolbert also leads the reader through the science of global warming making understandable seemingly arcane topics like "dangerous anthropogenic interference" (DAI), which is basically the point where something truly major goes haywire. Kolbert brings the joy of learning to the reader, until one ponders the potential consequences of what she lays out for us. Perhaps most disturbing is the evidence she marshals that the climate has already changed. For example, the climate has warmed sufficiently to allow numerous butterfly species to migrate to new previously too cold locations and to cause the extinction of certain frog species.

Scientists do not, of course, understand everything about climate change (indeed, it is in the very nature of science that an endpoint of total knowledge is never achieved). Those political and economic forces (primarily in the United States) that benefit from the status quo latch on to the uncertainties to create doubt among the public and forestall action. Her interviews with Bush administration officials strike an odd note - they stonewall with robotic incantations. While Europe and most of industrialized world has acted, the US has dithered, delayed, and denied.

Kolbert explains why scientists conclude that it is virtually certain that under the current `business as usual' approach, greenhouse gas concentrations will reach a level that causes massive coastal flooding, large scale extinctions, and crop failures leading to starvation (DAI). These outcomes will not be evenly distributed and are likely to fall heaviest on the poorest countries. Scientists do not, however, know what level of greenhouse gas concentration will cause these impacts. The Bush administration uses that uncertainty as a reason to do essentially nothing and Congress too has failed to force any action.

Kolbert's book inspires the reader to search out even more current information (NOAA's Arctic Change web site is one good source). And the news is alarming. This stuff is not just a tree hugger's paranoid delusion: global heating is happening, it is happening now, and it is getting worse faster than anticipated.

Kolbert's book is a work of journalism (and given the rapidly changing reality, journalism is probably the best source of information) that informs on both the science and the politics of climate change without stridently hectoring the reader. Kolbert presents the facts. The reader would have to be a dim bulb indeed not to get the picture.

Absolutely the very highest recommendation. Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe deserves more than 5 stars ( )

"It's really a very interesting time."

So a geophysicist from the University of Alaska tells Elizabeth Kolbert as she visits his study of the permafrost in Alaska. That "interesting time" is the global warming taking place on the planet.

Kolbert expanded a three-part series she wrote for New Yorker magazine into Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a highly readable and informative account of the causes of global warming, its implications and the problems in dealing with it. Field notes is an appropriate description. Kolbert isn't an author who sits at her desk, searching for information on the internet and doing telephone interviews. She takes the reader with her not only to the Alaska permafrost studies but to the ice pack in Greenland, glaciers in Iceland, butterfly studies near Yorkshire, England, and canals in the Netherlands built to reclaim land, as well as conferences on global warming and political offices.

Along the way, Kolbert translates what could be some difficult ideas for those of us who are science-impaired into understandable yet disconcerting prose.

Balance of review at http://prairieprogressive.com/?p=792