So you read a book about global warming. What are you, a liberal?
Actually, I'm a scientist. And like a scientist, I draw conclusions by collecting the available data and figuring out what it means. Data have nothing to do with politics, no matter what the politoidiots say.
So I guess you are going to tell us you are convinced.
Quite. What struck me about this book was how uncontroversial global warming is. There is no one who studies climate data who thinks the climate is not warming. This isn't even a question. What scientists are debating is how it is happening, and how fast it is going to happen. Kolbert uses a nice mixture of anecdotal evidence and hard statistics to show that the temperature is warming, and shows that it is happening faster than scientists expected it to. She points out the obvious -- that the sea level is rising, the polar ice cap is melting, and observed temperatures are increasing. And she points out the not so obvious -- that species of birds and butterflies are being found in places that were previously too cold for them, frogs mate earlier than they have only a few decades ago, and a hibernating mosquito has adapted its hibernating pattern in a way only explained by temperature change.
One of the strongest reasons to believe in global warming is indirect effects like animal behavior. These effects were not predicted by climate change models, but have been observed anyway. One test of the truth of a theory is that it explains effects that the creators of the theory would never have anticipated. Climate change theory does this in spades.
Climate change can explain why there has been a .1 change in pH in the oceans. There is no competing theory to explain that.
What is the most surprising thing you learned from this book?
Climate change theory is not new. In fact, the first scientist to predict global warming was the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who won a Nobel Prize for seminal discoveries in the behavior of electrolytes. In 1895, he argued that a doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures by six degrees. Although Arrhenius left out several complicating factors that make his model simple compared to modern calculations, his prediction is close to what today's scientists predict.
Thus, the argument that global warming is some kind of a plot cooked up in the 60s by a bunch of flower children looking for fame and fortune is historically wrong. Just flat out wrong.
What is the strongest argument Kolbert makes?
Not argument, arguments. What makes this book persuasive is that Kolbert shows that there is evidence for global warming everywhere scientists look. Glacier experts, lepidopterists, evolutionary biologists, oceanographers, and even epidemiologists have found direct and indirect evidence for it. And all this evidence fits together. Anyone who denies global warming has to explain away a who lot of coincidences that are explained by it.
So everyone should read this book?
Yes, unless you don't care that the choices you are making right now could cause billions of people to suffer within the next 100 years.