32 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth KolbertA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Kolbert begins her journey in Hotel Arctic in Ilulissat, on Greenland’s west coast. The icebergs carried by the Jakobshavn Isbrae current have diminished in size in recent years. Field Notes from a Catastrophe is a book about the realities of climate change. After all her research, Kolbert has concluded that a “critical threshold is approaching” (3). In the first half of the book, Kolbert tracks climate change from the arctic circle to Britain and the Netherlands. The second half of her book deals with the politics of environmental crisis.
Five miles from the Seward Peninsula, the island of Shishmaref is disappearing underwater. Life here consists of subsistence hunting with dog-sleds and snowmobiles. The islanders are contemplating leaving their home. Twenty-five years ago, the Charney panel from the National Academy of Sciences determined that climate change would become a problem. Since the 1970s, global temperatures have continued to rise, and scientific coverage of the issue has been continuous. Glaciers are shrinking, oceans are warming and becoming more acidic, and plants are blooming earlier. All are signs that the Charney panel forecasted.
Forest fires in Alaska burn longer due to the warm weather, and permafrost is melting. Boreholes in the ice are always warmer at depth but increasingly also at the surface, a sign the climate is warming. Carbon and methane, stored in the ice for millennia, are being released. In 1997, scientists aboard the 300-foot-long icebreaker Des Groseilliers found nine-foot-deep floes had shrunk to six feet since 1975. Overall, satellite data show arctic sea ice is melting. Nuclear submarines indicate it is 40 percent thinner. The more water that is exposed, the more solar energy warms it. Climate modeler John Weatherly predicts that the perennial sea ice will disappear completely by 2080.
In the 1850s, John Tyndall stumbled across atmospheric science while studying the absorptive properties of gases. He deduced that selectively transparent gases were responsible for warming the planet. Greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass freely into the earth’s atmosphere. The earth’s own radiation is emitted in the infrared part of the spectrum and so is partially blocked. Tyndall received the Nobel Prize, but it was Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius who first connected global warming with industrialization. In the 1950s, Charles David Keeling began measuring carbon dioxide in Hawaii and produced the “Keeling Curve,” showing an upward trend. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are projected to reach nearly double preindustrial levels by the middle of the century.
On the Swiss camp research station, a platform drilled into the Greenland ice sheet, a group of scientists study the climate. Greenland was founded in the year 985 by Erik the Red, but records expire in the autumn of 1408. At present more than 80 percent of Greenland is covered by ice. This ice provides records of the climate through time. Scientists have detected lead pollution from ancient Roman smelters and dust from Mongolia buried in the ice. Drills probe two miles beneath the surface to reveal huge temperature vacillations over the last 100,000 years. NASA scientists calculate that the ice sheet is shrinking by 12 mi.³ a year.
Greenland’s shrinking ice sheets are important because they provide what is colloquially called a “conveyor belt” which moves heat around the globe. Sinking cold water at the poles draws warm water from the tropics. Rising temperatures could mean shifts in ocean currents and weather systems, drastically cooling climates in places such as Britain, which is currently warmed by the Gulf Stream. A small ice age occurred in Europe around 500 years ago, during which approximately a third of Iceland’s population perished. The Icelandic Glaciological Society has observed shrinking glaciers in recent years. Though there is scientific debate about global warming, there is consensus among the scientific community that human beings have become the “dominant factor” impacting the climate (63). At a climate conference in Reykjavik in October 2000, there was frustration even among the American negotiators at the vagueness of the Bush administration’s climate policy.
The European Comma butterfly reaches its outer remit in Britain, where there is a lengthy history of the study of Lepidoptera. The butterfly has steadily moved northwards, as have several other species. Charles Darwin traced the impact of glaciation on insect migration in On the Origin of Species. Evolutionary biologists at the University of Oregon have observed shifting hibernation patterns among light sensitive mosquitoes. “Phenotypic plasticity” allows species to moderate their behavior in accordance with climate change. Jay Savage, A biologist from the University of Southern California, watched as a species known colloquially as the “golden toad” became extinct due to excessive cloud cover over its habitat in the Monteverde Cloud Forest.
Dramatic climate change is a natural occurrence, with saber-toothed cats and mastodons becoming extinct 30,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Humans’ carbon footprint places greater strain on the present equilibrium. Animal habitats have been fragmented by urbanization, and a board of biologists estimated that 37% of nonmobile species would become extinct by the middle of this century. Species migration offers new perspectives for scientists, but also threatens to disrupt ecosystems.
At the opening of her book on the realities of climate change, it is no coincidence that the icebergs passing by outside Kolbert’s hotel window in Greenland are evocative of the 1912 Titanic disaster. This ominous reference recalls an earlier instance of the might of American civilization bowing to the forces of nature. Kolbert opens the book by reminding her readers of the disaster of the previous century. The sinking of the Titanic is especially memorable as the unsinkable ship represented the hubris of our civilization. The Titanic was also a product of industrialization, which Kolbert argues is the source of the dangerous anthropogenic influence on climate change. The Titanic was named after a race of deities, and Kolbert’s evocation of it here, at the outset of her hard-hitting book on climate change, brings a mythological parallel to the questionable omnipotence of mankind as we approach a “critical threshold” (3).
Having established a precedent for the natural world proving mankind wrong, Kolbert sets out to explore the scientific perspectives on climate change from pole to pole. Kolbert acknowledges that her book does not attempt to present a comprehensive review of climate change science (3). In Chapter 2, Kolbert notes that climate science predates industrialization. Having anticipated these critiques, Kolbert proceeds to point out some alarming signs of climate change. In the spirit of journalism, Kolbert has authored an exposé on the fallibility of societal denial of climate change impacts and anthropogenic influence. While advancing her presentation of these distressing realities, Kolbert brings her readers to the coalface, so to speak, of climate change. Whether it be a disappearing island (Shishmaref), forest fires in Alaska, or Keeling’s Curve in Hawaii, Kolbert takes her readers to the front line of climate change, as her title suggests.
In Chapters 3 and 4, Kolbert considers the problem of climate change regarding human civilization and animal ecosystems. Perhaps controversially, given the biblical injunction that man has godlike dominion over the animal species, Kolbert posits an equivalence between human and animal life on the planet in these chapters. She reminds her readers of lost civilizations, such as mediaeval Greenland, the Roman and Mongol empires. Kolbert connects these lost civilizations, which once seemed so infallible with the extinction of species like saber-toothed cats.
Kolbert responds to the inevitable critique that climate change is by no means a new phenomenon. The climate has vacillated wildly throughout the planet’s history. Thus, it is not only industrialization that is to blame for climate change. Kolbert’s insights return comfortingly to the conception of nature as Gaia, a force that remains far more powerful than the influence or tampering of mankind. Of course, this archetype is an ambivalent one, with the destructive face of nature revealed in its habitual destruction of both civilizations and species. In another sense, Kolbert’s reminder of the continual volatility of nature, of its liability to shift radically within a short period of time, is anything but comforting. Though Kolbert sticks with the scientific evidence for climate change, the archetypal framework for these vast shifts seeps through her narrative. Inevitably, Kolbert entertains the apocalyptic register, which both lends urgency to her writing and encourages complacency by resolving the issue with myth, a topic with which Part 2 begins.
By Elizabeth Kolbert