Field Notes from a Catastrophe

In 2006, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New York Times journalist Elizabeth Kolbert published Field Notes from a Catastrophe, an urgent review of climate change. The book began as a tripartite publication in the New Yorker, for which the political journalist received a National Magazine Award.

Kolbert’s investigation begins on Greenland’s west coast, where natives have noticed the shrinking of icebergs for years. In another northerly location, the Alaskan island of Shishmaref is disappearing underwater, its inhabitants displaced, a prelude to the likely catastrophic impacts of climate change. Arctic sea ice has thinned by 40 percent since 1975, another indicator of global warming. Climate change is not a new concept. In the 1850s, chemist John Tyndall won a Nobel Prize for reasoning that the selective absorption of gases must be responsible for the earth’s warming. In the 1950s, Charles David Keeling produced the “Keeling Curve,” showing increasing carbon dioxide.

Returning to Greenland’s Swiss Camp Research Station, Kolbert traces the ancient history of Scandinavia, interrupted hundreds of years ago by multiple famines driven by climate change. The Greenland ice sheet is shrinking rapidly, but at a 2000 conference in Reykjavik, America’s Bush administration resisted taking declarative action. Kolbert follows climate change south to Britain, interviewing a lepidopterist who reports that more mobile species are migrating north due to rising temperatures. Biologists in Oregon and California have studied shifting hibernation patterns and extinction of vulnerable species. Huge fluctuations in the climate are natural, but humans’ greenhouse gas emissions disrupt an already delicate equilibrium.

The second half of Kolbert’s investigation is focused on this man-made “forcing” of the earth’s climate. Climate modelers have been measuring climate change since the 1980s, forecasting temperature rises of between 6-7 degrees Fahrenheit. Simultaneously, scientists agreed that the newly discovered empire of Akkad fell due to climate change-related crop loss. In the low-lying Netherlands, a 2003 public service campaign sought to brief the Dutch people on the impacts of climate change. Kolbert meets with Eelke Turkstra about floating house trials and the Dutch Government’s strategy to manage inundation. By the end of the century, the climate is predicted to be hotter than at any other time in human history, resembling that of the Eocene, 50 million years ago.

Robert Socolow, codirector of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, devised 15 “stabilization wedges” to keep global temperatures at safe levels. NYU physics professor Marty Hoffert claims Socolow has not accounted for recarbonization as countries like China and India industrialize. America emits nearly a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases. In 2005, the US became one of only two industrialized nations to avoid signing the Kyoto Protocol, which sought to prevent emissions reaching dangerous levels. Senator John McCain narrowly failed to pass a bill that would have forced Bush to comply with the Kyoto emissions regulations. Emissions have continued to climb.

In response, 170 US mayors signed a commitment to reduce emissions in line with the Kyoto Protocol. Burlington, Vermont has surpassed any other city in the country, but David Hawkins of the NRDC’s climate program claims that addressing China’s coal-powered growth is essential. Hawkins claims that China is following the precedent set by America in the 1940s and 1950s. Kolbert concludes her investigations with a coinage from Nobel Prize-winning Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen. We have entered the “Anthropocene” in which, for the first time in the 10,000 years since the climate first conspired for our prosperity, man is the dominant influence on the world’s climate.