After you spot a dozen of your relatives among these candid portraits, you'll see why the great apes are called our close cousins. The portraits on the back cover show a frowning gorilla looking at a smiling one, an inquiring chimpanzee, a smiling orangutan gazing skyward, and a fashion portrait of a wet bonobo.
William H. Calvin, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine, now affiliated with the Program on Climate Change of the College of the Environment. He is the author of Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change (University of Chicago Press 2008, see Global-Fever.org) and thirteen earlier books for general readers. He studies brain circuitry, ape-to-human evolution, climate change, and civilization's vulnerability to abrupt shocks.
In Global Fever, he writes: "The climate doctors have been consulted; the lab reports have come back. Now it's time to pull together the Big Picture and discuss treatment options. At a time when architects are thinking ahead to more efficient buildings and power planners are extolling the virtues of "renewable energy," the climate modelers have discovered that long-term planning will no longer suffice. Our fossil fuel fiasco has already painted us into a corner such that, if we don't make substantial near-term gains before 2020, the long-term is pre-empted, the efforts all for naught. We are already in dangerous territory and have to act quickly to avoid triggering widespread catastrophes. The only good analogy is arming for a great war, doing what must be done regardless of cost and convenience."
His climate talk in Beijing at the Great Hall of the People is available in streaming video as are other recent lectures at NASA and Rice University.
