Review by Sona Pai

For the lay person, the idea of global warming can get fuzzy pretty quickly -- even for those of us who have no doubts about its significance. It's like thinking about photosynthesis or gravity. We know it exists. We know it has a profound effect on the world around us. We know there's plenty of sound science to back it up. But still, we can't quite get it. Could a few degrees really lead to cataclysmic disaster? Could humans really be powerful enough to ruin the planet? Does it really feel that much warmer outside?

In the preface of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert immediately brings the concept from abstraction into sharp relief when she quotes a town councilman from Ilulissat, Greenland, who says, over a cup of coffee, "You don't get the big icebergs anymore." From that point on, she adds depth and detail to the picture with facts gathered during her travels to Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and the Netherlands -- where global warming is all too real to people who see their coastlines devoured by a rising sea and who trudge through slushy ice that was once solid ground.

A staff writer for the New Yorker and a former New York Times reporter, Kolbert expanded on three New Yorker articles she wrote in 2005 to create this book, which more than one reviewer has compared to Silent Spring. With first-hand reporting and thoughtful, thorough prose, Kolbert tells a story of climate change rich with scientific, historical, and political context. The facts are illuminating, but by the time Kolbert gets to a discussion of present-day carbon dioxide emissions and the Kyoto Protocol, the clarity she offers leads the reader to despair. How could we ever fix this mess?

We get a glimmer of hope when Kolbert highlights Burlington, Vermont's successful campaign to reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions. But then, she promptly shows us that China's insistence on burning coal will cancel out Burlington's efforts many times over. When Kolbert asks a Bush administration official about the president's refusal to cap emissions in the United States, the mystifying answer she keeps getting, "we act, we learn, we act again," would be comical if it weren't so depressing.

Kolbert's painstaking research is abundantly clear, and her impressive command of the information leaves the reader with the feeling that even though she's delivered a downer, she's done us a favor. She doesn't preach (much) or pretend to offer a solution. She informs. In the end, it's up to us to get over the feeling that we're helpless to make things better and understand that the least we can do is try not to make things worse.