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Last Generation - How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change |
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Author:
Fred Pearce
By Eden Project Books
Average Customer Rating: 
List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £2.53
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Book Description
Impeccably researched and explained survey of the evidence for imminent dramatic climate change.
Synopsis
Climate change is not a matter of gradually increasing temperatures. New scientific findings about how our planet works show that it does not do gradual change. Under pressure, it lurches into another mode of operation. Man-made global warming is on the verge of unleashing unstoppable planetary forces. Biological and geological monsters are being woken, and they will consume us. Virtually overnight Nature's revenge will be sudden and brutal, like a climatic tsunami sweeping across the globe. No question, we are the last generation to live with any kind of climatic stability. In this impassioned report, Fred Pearce travels the world on the story to end them all. Most troubling, while visiting the places where the action may start: deep in the Amazon, high in the Arctic and among the bogs of Siberia, he uncovers the first signs that nature's revenge is already under way.
From the Back Cover
'Engaging, lucid and balanced...This is a powerful book about the most important event in human history. Read it.'
PROFESSOR LORD MAY, OXFORD UNIVERSITY Since the last ice age, almost 13,000 years ago, human beings have prospered in a stable, predictable climate. But our generation is the last to be so blessed. In THE LAST GENERATION Fred Pearce lays bare the terrifying prognosis for our planet. Climate change from now on will not be gradual - nature doesn't do gradual change. In the past, Europe's climate has switched from Arctic to tropical in three to five years. It can happen again. So forget what environmentalists have told you about nature being a helpless victim of human excess. The truth is the opposite. She is a wild and resourceful beast given to fits of rage. And now that we are provoking her beyond endurance, she is starting to seek her revenge. 'Do we really need another book telling us that doom is imminent? In this case, the answer has to be yes.'
James Flint, DAILY TELEGRAPH
About the Author
Fred Pearce:
Fred Pearce is a former news editor at New Scientist magazine, and is currently its environment and development consultant. He is one of the world's leading writers on water. He also writes regularly for the Independent and the Times Higher Education Supplement, the Boston Globe and Foreign Policy in the US and has written reports and extended journalism for WWF, the UN Environment Programme, the Red Cross, UNESCO, the World Bank and the UK Environment Agency. He is syndicated in Japan, Australia and elsewhere and has filed articles from more than 50 countries in the past decade. He was voted BEMA Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and has been short-listed for the same award in 2000, 2002 and 2003. He is a past recipient of the Peter Kent Conservation Book Award and the TES Junior Information Book Award. His books (for both adults and children) have been translated into eight languages. He is a regular broadcaster on radio and TV, with interview credits from Today to Richard and Judy to the Open University.
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 A chilling book about global warming, 2007-01-29
'The Last Generation' is a chilling read concerning the likely dire consequences of man-made global warming. Very clearly written, Fred Pearce's book puts forward detailed and convincing scientific evidence that human fossil fuel burning is producing dramatic changes in the world's climate. Unless governments take drastic action to reduce greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the next decade nature will take its revenge and "climatic monsters" will be unleashed.
As the experienced climate scientist, Wally Broecker, says, "climate is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks".
As many people as possible should read this scary but thoughtful book, especially global warming sceptics such as George W. Bush and Jeremy Clarkson. It may even convert a few of them.
Compulsory reading for grounding yourself in the science of climate change, 2007-04-14
I've studied Environmental Science at degree level and I've got to say this is a very good overview the main climate science theories. It provides and honest and damn right scary synopsis of (mostly) well established climate science. It doesn't pretend to have all the answers but the sciences it presents is supportable and has been reviewed and tested by many scientists. Educational, open, honest and the stuff which nightmares are made of. The next few decades promises to be very different indeed and if the more extreme predictions showcased in this book are true (and there a chance they could be) then we could be facing the end of another civilization on planet earth. Compelling reading for skeptics and believers alike.
essential reading, 2007-07-30
I've had an interest in global warming since I read Kit Pedler's "Quest for Gaia" in the late 70's. That in turn lead me to James Lovelock's books. I've not read much on this topic for a while as I resigned myself years ago that there appears to be no collective global will to change things.
I looked on with a passing cynicism when the press and vote hungry politicians latched onto the "biggest threat facing mankind". I was appalled at the only part of Gore's London pop concert that I viewed to hear the Pussycat Dolls (of all people) telling the viewers (and no doubt the record buying public) how they'd all "researched" the threat of global warming and informing how they've now changed their light bulbs to more energy efficient bulbs.
How fantastic then that Fred Pearce should deliver a calm logical overview of the the impact that human beings have made and continue to inflict on their planet, and the possible/inevitable consequences of burying our collective heads in the sand. Mr Pearce provides a simple to understand (I'm no scientist) concise and devastating analysis of our predicament. No answers are offerred, but anybody reading this book would have to conclude either 1. We're already doomed or 2. We need to act globally now or our race will be wiped out as speedily & effectively as the dinosaurs at the altar of economic growth.
Anybody who paid for tickets/travel to the aforementioned Gore concert that had any concern for our planet would have been far better advised to buy this book,read it and then insist that their friends/family read it. Spreading this information to as many people as possible is the only way we'll ever get a sea change in the way the population of earth think about what their individual actions. The corporate bodies we all make purchases from & the politicians we vote for are already beginning to make lip service to "green" issues. Let's hope that this book becomes another stepping stone in this slow process as The Last Generation makes starkly clear, time is running out!
 Excellent anecdotes about climate scientists - but a missed opportunity to ask them penetrating questions, 2008-01-19
Fred Pearce, a scientific journalist, hopes he is "in the best sense, a sceptical environmentalist", doubtless a dig at Lomborg, although he makes it clear early on that his scepticism is mainly as to whether the IPCC's predictions go far enough - much of the book explores what he calls "Type II" climate change, those abrupt and irreversible changes that some argue will occur as a result of crossing climatic "tipping points".
Pearce starts with the history of the science of the greenhouse effect - starting with Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius. The latter was a Swedish scientist who made extensive manual calculations about the likely effect on global temperatures through increased atmospheric CO2 in the late nineteenth century. I was surprised at Pearce's suggestion that, for all their computers, modern climate change scientists' methods are essentially the same as his were, and that his calculation as to the effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 came essentially to the same result as the IPCC.
He goes on to explore much of the current evidence for warming, particularly melting ice, and to describe the tipping point effects, including methane "megafarts" and the breakdown of the "ocean conveyors" including the Gulf Stream. He writes with first hand experience of having visited scientists in some of the most remote parts of the world, and even the most hardened sceptics should stop and think about Pearce's evidence as to the extent to which glaciers and ice sheets are melting.
Pearce is inclined to dismiss "sceptics" politely but perfunctorily. For example, at the end of the second chapter, he says "despite their sometimes cynical motives...they are, if nothing else, helping to keep the good guys honest". In his "cast", listed at the beginning of the book, he lists many prominent exponents of the theory of man-made global warming, but no sceptics, and few are referred to by name in the course of the book. Where they are, Pat Michaels of University of Virginia, for example, it is with a pejorative like "maverick" and usually with a suggestion that they are in the payroll of the fossil fuel lobby.
Pearce writes engagingly, entertainingly - and alarmingly. The book did seem to me to be rather more like a collection of magazine articles than a coherent whole. In one chapter, for example, he writes "there is no known natural effect that can explain the 0.5-degree global warming in the past thirty years" and then, just two chapters and ten pages on, "abrupt change seems to be the norm". He reports someone as saying that an ice-free arctic would be the first for more than a million years - but offers no proof. How do we know? He mentions fears that "The Dust Bowl was returning" without exploring the possibility that the mid-west was in fact warmer in the 1930s than the 1990s - as a reinterpretation of US temperature records suggests may indeed have been the case.
In his appendix Pearce proposes solutions - better insulation, more efficient vehicles, double the amount of nuclear power, deploy solar electric etc, with most of which I would heartily agree: even if the effect of CO2 and methane is less than Pearce reports, the sooner we start heading off lesser but more probable effects the better.
"The Last Generation", by the way, refers not to the last human generation that will survive at all but the last that will enjoy a stable climate. I enjoyed the book while retaining a feeling that in many cases the deductions made from the evidence were far from the only possible ones. Pearce has had the opportunity to speak to many of the world's most prominent climate scientists, and my only regret is that, despite what he claims about being a sceptic, he did not ask them more penetrating questions.
One aside that I have to mention: those who know Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy (or the film "The Golden Compass") might be amused to learn that Scoresby was a late C17 whaler and amateur scientist who hunted in the Greenland Sea around the islands on Svalbard.
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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9781903919880
ISBN: 1903919886
Label: Eden Project Books
Manufacturer: Eden Project Books
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Publisher: Eden Project Books
Studio: Eden Project Books |
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