Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Kolbert opens the book by divulging that Greenland’s ice cores reveal wild vacillation in the earth’s temperature over the past 100,000 years: “The earth, which had been warming rapidly, was plunged back into ice age conditions. It remained frigid for twelve centuries and then warmed again, even more abruptly” (51). Naturally, a book about climate change entails discussion of temperature volatility. Yet Kolbert begins by acknowledging the reality of claims made by climate change detractors. Admittedly, huge swings in climate are a part of the earth’s natural history. Yet Kolbert goes on to show that scientists are in consensus that human intervention is responsible for the rapid change in climate we are currently experiencing: “Most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities,” a 2001 IPCC Report said.

Alternative forms of instability associated with temperature volatility include the unpredictability of climate change impacts. Flooding is one such impact that Kolbert explores: “There are several reasons why global warming produces flooding,” she writes (123). Warm water expands, and weather patterns are also altered by rising temperatures. While Kolbert was writing the book, Hurricane Katrina hit the United States, displacing entire communities and disrupting lives. Some of the most populous places on Earth border on rivers that will become increasingly prone to flooding as temperatures rise. While in the low-lying Netherlands aquatic housing has been designed to solve this problem, other places lack the infrastructure and funding for such strategies. Indeed, developing nations near the equator will endure some of the worst effects of warming temperatures, and already contend with droughts that lead to famine.

Destruction of habitats due to climate instability results in the extinction of species that play a vital role in important ecosystems, including those essential for human life. Biologist Chris Thomas has hypothesized “a quarter of all the terrestrial species might be at risk of extinction from climate change” (87). If this is so, human life will certainly be affected and threatened by increasing climate instability: “We are heading in a direction that, quite fundamentally, we don’t know what the consequences are going to be,” Thomas adds (87). Yet of all the uncertainties involved in modeling climate change, Kolbert argues that the most unpredictable factor yet is the behavior of the human species in the face of these challenges.