True tales of mass and energy balance to chill your bones

The arctic ice is getting mushy, giant storms are threatening to swallow our grandchildren, and our politicians are not making the policies to halt the damage to our compromised planet. Who needs horror fiction to pack in your beach bag as you watch the tsunami rising?

 

Field Notes From A Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
Elizabeth Kolbert (2006)

The longtime New Yorker correspondent has assembled this book from her 2005 series of magazine pieces. She traveled with various field scientists around the Arctic Circle, from the thinning Greenland ice sheet to remote places like Shishmaref, Alaska, a seal hunting village that’s falling into the sea, house by house, with each passing spring. It's a numbers game, and her vivid writing and an animated grasp of details that keeps you reading. She also did some neat research on the first researchers to stumble on the subject of global warming. It was back in the 1850s when Irishman John Tyndall -- one of the very first to earn the new "Ph.D." degree -- became interested in the science of heat, the presence of CO2 in the air, and its effect on the climate. In 1902, Swedish chemist Svane Arrhenius thought that the rising levels of carbon dioxide would raise the temperature of the earth in a good way, allowing farmers to grow produce year round under a "warm sky."

Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and The Battle Over Global Warming
Chris Mooney (2007)

The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the worst on record, with 27 named storms. The last one, in December, was dubbed Hurricane Epsilon when the English alphabet ran out. Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, expands on his 2005 Internet article Thinking Big About Hurricanes: It's Time to Get Serious About Saving New Orleans , which was actually published a few months before Katrina. His book follows top meteorologists as they argue whether global warming is affecting the strength of hurricanes. But the more frightening aspect addresses our political paralysis: scientists, government, and the media cannot seem to work together so that we are always unprepared for the inevitable natural or unnatural catastrophe. Mooney delivers a readable, fast moving exchange between scientists and politicians, each with their own agenda -- neither of which includes our safety.

Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity
James Hansen (2009)

Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, begins where Mooney leaves off. Hansen was one of the first scientists to testify before Congress (or as he would say, “bear witness”) on Global Warming, way back in the 1980s. He’s also an earth science professor at Columbia University, so he thoroughly covers our greenhouse gas problems, on the planet and from above. The birth of his grandchildren over the last ten years, his knowledge of what storms are going to look like in their lifetime, and his belief that the Powers That Be are out of their depth, have given him the drive to write this book. "I am sorry to say that most of what politicians are doing on the climate front is greenwashing - their proposals sound good, but they are deceiving you and themselves at the same time."

Dr. Hansen dedicates this book, "To Sophie, Connor, Jake and all the world's grandchildren." Elizabeth Kolbert dedicates her Field Notes from a Catastrophe "To My Boys," and Chris Mooney's Storm World is dedicated to his mother who lost her home and New Orleans neighborhood in 2005.

These authors are scared and they seem to have the facts. The biggest fears of our politicians, the policy makers, seem to center on getting re-elected.