Customer Reviews

Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley

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I found this book interesting and well-written. It is not a book by a scientist or someone pretending to do science writing -- it is a book by a journalist who traveled extensively, learned some things on the ground, and reported back on what they learned. It avoids questions about why there is warming, and it avoids speculation about the future: it talks about impacts that warming is having on the world today. It would be a good book to give to someone who was inclined towards being argumentative around warming: it avoids all the standard arguments and just reports on what is.

The book shares structure and perhaps a "type" with Jared Diamond's Collapse: a series of chapters illustrating different aspects of a larger phenomenon. It does not pull off the same grand abstract sense of wonder that Diamond is capable of, but it has a greater warmth.

I found the sections on Dafur, Bangladesh, and Kashmir chilling: the book does a great job of describing the political/social situation on the ground, sketching out how these complex and fragile places are particularly susceptible to climate change, and then talking about the terrible consequences that are already playing out. In the US, the book describes the reaction of the insurance industry to our increasingly chaotic weather, and how that effects communities like New Orleans and the Florida Keys. The section on how the wine industry is being effected by warming was interesting: tough luck France, I guess.

I enjoyed "Forecast" and have recommended it to several people. What I liked most about the book, is that it was not designed to convince anyone about climate change, but simply described impacts. The book is very well-written -- easy to read. I think it can do more to convince people of the truth of climate change and the overall lack of debate in the scientific community than books that rely heavily on climate data.

Because I am a physical scientist who reads several scientific journals; I was aware of most of the facts and expected impacts presented. However, I don't know that anyone has put it altogether so nicely without any inclusion of politics. So, I hope a lot of people read it.

There are plenty of books on the climate crisis, but a readable one is rare enough to fetch a Nobel Peace Prize. Though solutions depend on specific and possibly boring knowledge and actions, political and public support requires general understanding and passionate attention. This book is written not by a committee nor as the result of group findings, but by an individual writer--not a scientist or a politician but an astute and acute journalist. It is that rarity: excellently reported and written, very readable and therefore an important book on the most significant topic of our time.

It's a post-Inconvenient Truth treatment that doesn't analyze or speculate but describes. This isn't about the far future, but changes already underway that are bound to increase in the next few decades: "impacts that range from the subtle and sometimes benign to the horrific and potentially catastrophic...Yet we don't have to guess at the consequences of a warming world...The future of our planet can be found now, on the frontiers of climate change."

My one note of warning is that dealing with the effects of the climate crisis, as described in this book, are going to become more and more important. But it is just as crucial to continue trying to deal with the causes, so that there aren't much, much worse consequences for the future.


That said, if you read just one book on the climate crisis this year, "Forecast" should be it.

This book is at once a travel log and a clear-eyed description of the inter-connected nature of environment, economics, identity and politics across the globe. The stories in each chapter take on broad topics (agriculture, immigration, insurance, national sovereignty, the spread of disease, armed conflict, and natural disaster) from the bottom up, showing how individuals across the planet are witnessing the impact of changing weather patterns on their own local and national issues. Each chapter weaves stories from several points on the globe into a great web of causality, where the expanding Sahara contributes to the breakdown of age-old social ties to war and genocide to an influx of the desperate into European ports to xenophobic (and green!) political movements. At the same time the author has a traveler's eye for detail, stopping to share the smell of the air in a dry riverbed between Chad and Sudan, the ride through new farmland to the retreating edge of the Amazon rainforest, the faces and voices of dozens of characters, real people dealing with small-scale problems, who have come to realize that their problems do not play out on such a small scale after all. A good read and a convincing call to action, although it presents no easy answers.

The author takes readers on a trip around the world to look at what is, according to the author, the results of the start of climate change. While I am not a climate change skeptic, and believe some changes resulting from climate change can already be seen, I am just not sure all of the examples given by the author are really examples of change caused by climate change.

Several of the author's examples can readily be seen as changes caused by climate change. Changes in location and productivity of wine grapes are a very good example. We know where they have grown in the past and how they have produced grapes. We also now know where they can be planted successfully that were not productive previously. Given no other changes, this really must be indicative of climate change. The same can be said for the massive changes that are occurring in the Arctic regions of the world.

It gets a little more complicated when you are trying to pin hurricane frequency and strength on climate change. The data is just not strong enough, nor has it be recorded for long enough to be able to make a certain link between the two events. Similarly, the burning of the Amazon and movement of malaria cannot be linked directly to climate change. Any student of malaria knows that it has had a very broad range in the past (including as far north as Russia) and that the disease can be very hardy as long as the proper mosquitoes are present. It is a disease best transmitted by tropical mosquitoes, but is not confined to those species.

Overall, the book is well written and may very well be a very early forward looking peek at what is in store. The data, however, leaves a lot open and we may not know if the author's assumptions were correct until after things have declined.

Journalist Stephan Faris goes around the world to see for himself up close and personal what climate change means to the lives of people. He begins in Darfur where the rising temperature is allowing the Sahara Desert to extend its reach, the immediate result of which is bloody war between herders and farmers. (People are wonderful as long as they get what they need. Should the crops dry up and their animals find no grazing, they'll kill you.)

Chapter 2 finds Faris in Florida (where the waters are rising and the hurricanes are getting really frequent and fierce); from there in Chapter 3 he examines the immigration problem in Europe where the brown and often Muslim folk from equatorial lands encroach upon the relatively rich whites of the north and cause incipient nationalism (read fascism) to begin its rise again.

In Chapter 4 the Amazon is burning and malaria is moving north. In Chapter 5 Faris arrives in Napa Valley to taste the wines and hear how the warmer weather will chase the wine grapes north, perhaps to Alaska. (Well, southern England is now, as it once was in the 14th century, wine grape country.) In Chapter 6 Faris is in Churchill where the polar bears roam and near where the arctic ice is melting and staying melt for so long that a Northwest Passage year round is becoming possible. (Some good yet may come of this global warming, at least for the town of Churchill, although the polar bears will be considerably inconvenienced.)

In Chapter 7, we learn about the water rising in Bangladesh and how the Himalayas do not feed the rivers as they once did, thereby threatening the grain harvest in Pakistan, and how the coming conflict over water between Pakistan and India may result in nuclear war. The aquifers are falling. It costs more all the time to pump that water up from farther and farther down; and someday it will be gone and the crops will wilt and die and famine with spread across the land.

In an epilogue Faris muses about the challenge of climate change and how unlikely it is that we will solve it before the really harsh pain sets in. He asks, "If the richest people on the planet won't make economic sacrifices to address the problem, what chance is there that the rest of the world will?"

Actually the richest people are in denial and they don't really care about the rest of world. This is another book on global warming, engagingly and gracefully written, that will become a target of the deniers, who, like creationists, close their eyes to the science and celebrate willful ignorance. Let them (the people of the future) eat cake is what they effectively say--or actually it will be dirt--and in some places it already is dirt.

But I have to say that some of the problems that Faris addresses--starving people in Africa in particular, and also the poor people in Bangladesh who face the rising waters--are more the result of political mismanagement and greed than they are of global warming. And most significantly in many places in the world there are just too many people for the land to reliably support. Indeed many of the problems of the world would be greatly alleviated, or at least made tractable, if there were say half a billion people on the planet instead of six and a half billion. Unless this truth is realized and acted upon, humanity and the creatures of our stewardship are in for some horrific times to come.

Don't get me wrong - I understand the serious threat that man-made climate change poses. This book also has an interesting concept of portraying the current impacts of climate change. It's just that there is a huge industry of climate change books out there, and this book doesn't really add much for anyone who hasn't been living under a rock the past decade.

Those of you who follow climate change in the news are probably already aware of the links between climate and the conflict in Darfur, changes in wine vineyards, competition for arctic resources, increased hurricanes such as Katrina, and the potential for Bangladesh to be flooded. The book basically consists of anecdotes about these topics. Each chapter is almost independent (they seem as if they were originally written for the New Yorker or some other magazine). Some chapters are actually pretty good, such as the chapter on wine vinyards. Others seem t have only a tenuous connection to climate, such as the one about immigration in into Europe (there is potential for immigration north to increase if the equatorial region warms, but it simply isn't happening yet nor are the consequences discussed).

I originally thought the book would be a bit more like Wildlife Responses to Climate Change : North American Case Studies, which tracks current wildlife responses to climate and uses solid date. Instead Faris' book is never really quite so focused and spends too much time on irrelevant topics. If you want to learn more about the science of climate change, I still recommend The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, even though it is a few years old already.

At the end, the author ironically admits that he used over nine times the average person's carbon emissions just in writing this book. I give him credit for admitting that, but I also think it's emblematic of the problems with climate change writing - too many people pontificating about, not enough people taking action.

Mr. Faris' book is a rambling, eclectic mix of articles only loosely tied together by climate change. I had the sense some of the chapters had been written earlier for some other project. The chapters on Afghanistan, India, Darfur, and particularly chapter 3 are only tangential to climate change. The chapters seem "fluffed" with journalistic color, with historical backgrounds of little consequence to climate change, and irritatingly formulaic descriptions of whatever his interviewees are wearing.

For newbies to climate change, this might be a good jumping off point since it encompasses so many issues. For anyone who has even remotely followed this phenomenon it is not in-depth enough to be interesting.

The greatest failing is that we never really hear Mr. Faris' voice. The journalist's advantage in writing a book is to abandon periodical objectivity and provide his perspective based on experience. Sadly, Mr. Faris let this opportunity slide.

Only the chapters on wine, Key West, and the Arctic are worth reading.
For something deeper, from a journalist who does more digging, read Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, which I couldn't help comparing to "Forecast". It is far more detailed, focused, impassioned, and cohesive.

A well-written and very readable book that describes present impact of climate change on human life in locations around the globe, from the conflict in Darfur to the interior of Brazil to vineyards in the American west to a remote port in northern Canada. Each chapter deals with a new region, and the book describes, vividly, what has happened in the past and is happening right now in human terms, rather than dire predictions for the future. An informative book that gives much food for thought.

If Faris had only spent as much time citing sources for the figures he so blithely tosses about as he did describing the attire of the various people he purportedly interviewed, the book might have some significance. As written, the book only adds credence to the argument that global warming is psuedo science. Don't waste your money on this light weight pop science novelette