It's natural at the end of one year and the beginning of another to take stock of what has happened, and to look forward to the future. This past January, The New Yorker launched a three-part series by Elizabath Kolbert on global warming. This year, it's the turn of Bill McKibben in The New York Review of Books. McKibben's piece is much shorter, and pitched as a review of two new books on the subject, but I must say, he gets to the heart of the matter much more quickly than Kolbert did. Perhaps that's becaue he doesn't try to explain the physical processes--which by now are well-known to anyone who cares to pay attention--but simply looks at the evolution of the science of the issue. It's stunning, memorable, and leaves the bogus far behind.
In the review, McKibben quotes Ohio State scientist Lonnie Thompson, who has spent the last twenty years of his life documenting the vanishing of glaciers around the world, but has long been reluctant to take on the issue in public. Thompson admits that the conservatism of scientists has been part of the reason the public has been slow to awake to this issue:
Scientists are by training and nature conservative and...have probably underestimated our impact. Fifty years from now—I hope I'm wrong—I think you may be living in a world where you don't go outside between one and four in the afternoon.
The piece is short, well-written, and well worth reading.
