Techniques & Strategies in Environmental Conservation & Protection, Green Living

High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis

Name: High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis
Author: Mark Lynas
ISBN: 9780312303655

by Mark Lynas

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Overview

"President Bush and his Administration have risen to the global warming challenge with responses ranging from obfuscation to pretense to outright denial...I'd like to issue each and every one of them a challenge. Come with me—see what I have seen—and try to understand what global warming really means for us and for our children. Leave Washington and travel to the places I have visited..."—From the Preface

A glacier disappears high in the Peruvian Andes. Floodwaters surge across the English countryside. Ten thousand Pacific Islanders begin to evacuate their homeland. A dust storm turns day into night across the Inner Mongolian plains. These events may seem unrelated, but they are not. Even as scientists and other experts debate the specifics, climate crisis is already affecting the lives of millions.

In this ground-breaking book, Mark Lynas reveals the first evidence—collected during an epic three-year journey across five continents—about how global warming is hitting people's lives all around the world. From American hurricane chasers to Mongolian herders, from Alaskan Eskimos to South Sea islanders, Lynas's encounters and discoveries give us a stark warning about the even worse dangers that lie ahead if nothing is done.

High Tide's message is urgent and its revelations are at once shocking and inspiring—shocking as so few of us yet realize the magnitude of what’s happening, and inspiring as there is still time to avert much greater catastrophe. No one who reads this book will be able to look their children in the eyes and say "I didn’t know."

As global temperatures soar to record levels, Lynas bears witness to:

- CRIPPLING DROUGHT: China's Yellow River no longer reaches the sea for half the year, and villages across the north of the country are disappearing under advancing sand dunes

- BAKED ALASKA: Permafrost is melting, leaving houses, roads and whole forests sucked into the thawing ground. Winter is in retreat, leaving animals confused and Native Alaskan people without a livelihood

- DISAPPEARING GLACIERS: Every glaciated mountain range on Earth is experiencing massive ice losses. Montana's Glacier National Park has lost 100 glaciers in the last century; only 50 remain. Water supplies to hundreds of millions of people—from Peru to Pakistan—are threatened

- HIGH TIDES: Islanders on the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu are already leaving their homeland as rising sea levels engulf their atolls. Today 70 percent of the world’s sandy shorelines are retreating; up to 90 percent of the beaches on the Eastern U.S. seaboard are eroding fast

- CATASTROPHIC FLOODS: English villagers now talk about a "wet season" rather than a winter. Heavier rainfall is now falling across the global mid-latitudes, from the continental U.S. to Russia, sparking devastating floods on an ever more frequent basis.

Synopsis

As global temperatures soar to record levels, Lynas bears witness to:

- CRIPPLING DROUGHT: China's Yellow River no longer reaches the sea for half the year, and villages across the north of the country are disappearing under advancing sand dunes

The Washington Post - Nicols Fox

Telling the story of climate change through his personal experience and those of ordinary individuals is strategically brilliant. While Lynas includes the requisite barrage of numbers and statistics and notes to support his examples, the real-life stories -- the human and emotional content -- are what make High Tide a compelling and powerful read, albeit profoundly depressing. Clearly the unpleasantness is upon us.

About the Author, Mark Lynas

Mark Lynas is a journalist, campaigner and broadcast commentator on environmental issues. He is a contributor to the New Statesman, Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, and the Guardian and Observer in the UK. He lives in Oxford, England.

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Editorials

Nicols Fox

Publishers Weekly

Deeply disturbed by unprecedented rain and catastrophic flooding in his native England, journalist Lynas set out on a three-year journey to bear witness to global climate change. Traveling to Alaska to see vanishing tundra, to the growing deserts of Inner Mongolia, to a tiny Pacific island nation facing devastation from rising ocean levels and finally to disappearing glaciers in Peru, Lynas vividly describes the physical and human toll our fossil fuel-based culture takes on the planet. Not a scientist himself, Lynas bolsters his case with abundant footnoted scientific references. This is both personal journey and fierce polemic. Much of his political argument and ire is directed squarely at the U.S. In Lynas's view, the U.S., through its domestic and foreign policy, has undermined the valiant efforts of a coalition of developed and developing countries to control and even reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which the first Bush administration threatened to boycott had there been any agreement that included mandatory restrictions, through what he sees as the Clinton policy of "green" lip service, to the second Bush administration's 2001 unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, Lynas portrays a government in league with carbon-producing and -consuming industrialists bent on promoting a vision "that what is good for oil corporations is good for America and, by extension the world." In prose that is deeply felt and poignant, if sometimes awkward, Lynas makes no concession to evenhandedness in his assessment of the status quo. With a closing section including a six-point manifesto for addressing the global warming crisis and a comprehensive appendix listing information sources, advocacy groups and Web sites, this could well serve as a primer for budding anti-global-warming activists. 6 pages of illus., maps not seen by PW. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In 2000, British journalist Lynas began to wonder if global warming was causing the abnormal weather England has experienced recently. He embarked on a journey to understand the severe weather changes occurring there and abroad. In places ranging from Alaska to Inner Mongolia and Tuvalu in the Pacific, he asked people how the weather had changed over their lifetimes and met with scientists to find out how and why these changes were occurring. In the end, he developed a deep personal belief that the climate is warming on a global scale and that people must act to save the future of their children. He discusses the politics that have impeded the success of the Kyoto Protocol and warns that politics must be set aside if humanity is to respond to this crisis in time. For readers on the fence about or new to the global warming issue, Lynas provides a clearly written introduction to its human perspective. Recommended for public and high school libraries. Betty Galbraith, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pulllman Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-An eye-opening examination of some of "the first whispers of the hurricane of future climate change which is now bearing down on us." In a series of vivid travel narratives, Lynas shows the human side of global warming, taking readers to Britain, North and South America, China, and the South Pacific. He introduces them to folks whose houses and roads are falling crazily through melting permafrost, who are going hungry because fishing lakes have disappeared, and who are becoming refugees because their grasslands have turned to desert. In the Andes, he finds glaciers that entire cities depend on for their water supply rapidly disappearing. In the South Pacific, he finds an island paradise in the process of being lost as rising high tides render the nation increasingly uninhabitable. The author clearly explains why these are not isolated incidents, but interrelated parts of a worldwide set of phenomena that soon will affect us all. As an Englishman, he recognizes American concern but nails our wasteful lifestyle and our "confusion of politics and corporate self-interest." He urges that it's still possible to make a difference, and lists organizations and Web sites to contact, and suggests a number of things anyone can do to help.-Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The sky is falling, and no one seems to be noticing. At least, no one around these parts. According to British journalist Lynas, "a 2001 survey found that only 15% of US citizens correctly identified fossil fuel-burning as the primary cause of global warming-far behind Mexico, with 26% getting the right answer, and just behind Cuba, with 17%." Despite the gainsaying of First World governments and rightist think tanks, global warming is, Lynas argues, an indisputable reality: there is no other good way to explain phenomena such as the disappearance of Oceanic atolls, overwhelmed by rising seas, and the ongoing inundation of the British Isles, swept by flood-inducing rainstorms at levels not seen since the time when weather records were first kept. Is there a smoking gun? Perhaps no readily visible one, Lynas admits, but the circumstantial evidence points strongly to Western industrial lifestyles. Traveling the globe, calling on places such as Aberdeen, Tuvalu, Beijing, and Tallahassee, Lynas gathers opinions, evidence, and sightings, talks with atmospheric scientists and ordinary citizens, and assembles some disturbing arguments: at the end of the present century, he prophesies, the world sea level will have risen by a meter, flooding fertile river deltas and putting millions, and possibly billions, of people at risk. "Although the most valuable real estate in places like Manhattan or Miami is likely to be protected by sea walls for the foreseeable future," he wryly notes, "it will be impossible to enclose all the world's affected areas with concrete." And what is to be done? There are no surprises in Lynas's recommendations: approve and enforce the Kyoto Protocol, stop drilling for oil,reduce the industrial production of greenhouse gases, drive less-and make sure everyone knows that the sky is falling. For all environmental activists/educators-and those new to the ongoing debate about global climate change.