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The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather,
and the Destruction of Civilizations

One crucial, timely topic. Two highly regarded journalists. Two books on the same subject, published within a few weeks of each other.

A conclusion-jumper might assume the two books are more alike than not. That would be a mistake.

Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes from a Catastrophe" and Eugene Linden's "The Winds of Change" inevitably share some common features.

Both are about global climate change, or global warming, if you prefer.

Both are essentially works of explanatory journalism, skillfully written in the authors' own calm and consistently interesting ways, emphasizing reporting and analysis but not shying away from carefully grounded opinions.

Both deal with many of the same subjects, some of which will seem arcane to general readers – climate-regulating patterns in ocean current called "thermohaline circulation," for instance, and the possibly climate-caused fall of the ancient Akkadian civilization of the Middle East.

Both authors end up expressing profound concern for humanity's future in a world buffeted by a changing climate system.

Ultimately, however, these are two distinctive books, each offering much that the other does not, each with its own virtues. Any environmental journalist, even one immersed in the climate issue, would be rewarded by deciding not to choose between them, but to read both.

The two authors have markedly different professional backgrounds, which may account in part for some of the differences in their books.

Kolbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1999, was previously a political writer and Albany bureau chief for the New York Times. A previous book, "The Prophet of Love: And Other Tales of Power and Deceit," compiled profiles she had written for the New Yorker on New York public figures.

Linden is a veteran environment and science journalist, who wrote about global environmental issues, including climate change, for Time for many years. Besides contributing to other prominent publications, he is the author of a number of books on wildlife, including "The Parrot's Lament," and other subjects.

Their new climate books are both heavy on science, and both deal with climate politics. But, perhaps owing to different perspectives shaped different career trajectories, a somewhat greater part of Kolbert's book is focused on political and policy-related subjects.

Another key difference between the two books – Linden's is more than 50 percent longer – reflects still other features. Kolbert's graceful concision adds power to her book. Linden's accumulation of detail provides a richness that conveys its own kind of force.

"Field Notes from a Catastrophe" is an expansion of a series of articles published in the New Yorker in the spring of 2005.

In the preface, she says that the book's "goal remains much the same as that of the original series: to convey, as vividly as possible, the reality of global warming."

The book's title, "Field Notes from a Catastrophe," suggests both its structure and the conclusion that Kolbert draws about what humanity is doing to the earth and itself with man-made climate change.

The book is divided roughly in half, with two sections, titled "Nature" and "Man." Largely, it comprises the writer's dispatches from the front lines of climate change, sequenced to introduce concepts and terms that figure in later chapters and build narrative momentum.

Kolbert explains:

The opening chapters are set near or above the Arctic Circle – in Deadhorse, Alaska; in the countryside outside of Reykjavik; at Swiss Camp, a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. I went to these particular places for all the usual journalistic reasons – because someone invited me to tag along on an expedition, because someone let me hitch a ride on a helicopter, because someone sounded interesting over the telephone. The same is true of the choices that were made in the subsequent chapters, whether it was a decision to track butterflies in northern England or to visit floating houses in the Netherlands. Such is the impact of global warming that I could have gone to hundreds if not thousands of other places – from Siberia to the Austrian Alps to the Great Barrier Reef to the South African fynbos – to document its effects. These alternate choices would have resulted in an account very different in its details, but not in its conclusions.

It is the subtitle of Linden's book, on the other hand, that conveys its historically-oriented thrust: "Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations."

Weaving together recent findings from various scientific disciplines including paleoclimatology, oceanography and anthropology, Linden presents an explicitly organized and cautionary argument that growing research evidence suggests a rapidly shifting climate has been a "serial killer" of human societies in the past.

He writes:

I offer evidence that we disregard the role of climate in history at our peril. I've structured the book along the lines of a case. The opening section presents the prosecution's argument that climate change has either killed off or at least been an accomplice in the fall of several civilizations. It quickly runs through the various victims (and a notable evolutionary beneficiary), and also details the weapons and methods of this civilization killer.

Later sections present supporting and competing scientific evidence about climate's profound role in the past, stressing scientific questions, uncertainties and disagreements. In this historical context, Linden discusses evidence suggesting that major, human-caused climate change now may occur more rapidly than earlier predictions indicated, with a particularly worrisome and harmful period of "flickering" (or fluctuating) weather before the planetary climate system settles into a more stable, if greatly altered, pattern.

As different as their books are, the two authors draw strikingly similar conclusions in their closing chapters, both citing Hurricane Katrina's devastation to paint speculative pictures of the forced migrations and other socio-economic and political turmoil that glocal climate change could create.

Kolbert:

The feedbacks that have been identified in the climate system – the ice-albedo feedback, the water vapor feedback, the feedback between temperatures and carbon storage in the permafrost – take small changes to the system and amplify them into much larger forces. Perhaps the most unpredictable feedback of all is the human one. With six billion people on the planet, the risks are everywhere apparent. A disruption in the monsoon patterns, a shift in ocean currents, a major drought – any one of these could easily produce streams of refugees numbering in the millions. As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

Linden:

Katrina stretches our capacity to imagine horror, but some of the things that might happen – droughts that last more than a century, an advance of arctic zones southward, incessant and epic storms – simply overwhelm the imagination when we try to apply them to a world of 6 billion people depending on an exquisitely balanced food system .... One can't be certain that we are creating this hell on earth, but when in the past have we demanded certainty before acting on a potential global threat? Short of certainty, there is a good chance, a better-than-even chance, that some version of the scenario described above lies before us. Yet, like the tourist standing on the beach, we stand passively waiting to see what will happen. It may be that most people are not aware of the risks, particularly given all the qualifications and disinformation that accompany reports on climate change. That excuse gets thinner by the year. If as a nation and as leaders of the world community we continue to refuse to take action to keep this serial killer at bay, or worse invite it into our house, then we will meet our fate.

It's not mainly for their grim conclusions, however, that environmental journalists would benefit from reading these two books. Rather, it's to learn more about the subject they examine and the exemplary methods the writers bring to the task. It's certainly a subject that looks certain to be a growing part of the environment beat – and others, as well – for as long as today's journalists are working.