High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis [Paperback]

Mark Lynas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2004

"President Bush and his Administration have risen to the global warming challenge with responses ranging from obfuscation to pretense to outright denial...I'd like to issue each and every one of them a challenge. Come with me--see what I have seen--and try to understand what global warming really means for us and for our children. Leave Washington and travel to the places I have visited..."--From the Preface

A glacier disappears high in the Peruvian Andes. Floodwaters surge across the English countryside. Ten thousand Pacific Islanders begin to evacuate their homeland. A dust storm turns day into night across the Inner Mongolian plains. These events may seem unrelated, but they are not. Even as scientists and other experts debate the specifics, climate crisis is already affecting the lives of millions.

In this ground-breaking book, Mark Lynas reveals the first evidence--collected during an epic three-year journey across five continents--about how global warming is hitting people's lives all around the world. From American hurricane chasers to Mongolian herders, from Alaskan Eskimos to South Sea islanders, Lynas's encounters and discoveries give us a stark warning about the even worse dangers that lie ahead if nothing is done.

High Tide's message is urgent and its revelations are at once shocking and inspiring--shocking as so few of us yet realize the magnitude of what’s happening, and inspiring as there is still time to avert much greater catastrophe. No one who reads this book will be able to look their children in the eyes and say "I didn’t know."

As global temperatures soar to record levels, Lynas bears witness to:

- CRIPPLING DROUGHT: China's Yellow River no longer reaches the sea for half the year, and villages across the north of the country are disappearing under advancing sand dunes

- BAKED ALASKA: Permafrost is melting, leaving houses, roads and whole forests sucked into the thawing ground. Winter is in retreat, leaving animals confused and Native Alaskan people without a livelihood

- DISAPPEARING GLACIERS: Every glaciated mountain range on Earth is experiencing massive ice losses. Montana's Glacier National Park has lost 100 glaciers in the last century; only 50 remain. Water supplies to hundreds of millions of people--from Peru to Pakistan--are threatened

- HIGH TIDES: Islanders on the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu are already leaving their homeland as rising sea levels engulf their atolls. Today 70 percent of the world’s sandy shorelines are retreating; up to 90 percent of the beaches on the Eastern U.S. seaboard are eroding fast

- CATASTROPHIC FLOODS: English villagers now talk about a "wet season" rather than a winter. Heavier rainfall is now falling across the global mid-latitudes, from the continental U.S. to Russia, sparking devastating floods on an ever more frequent basis.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

While governments debate and scientists test ever-more complicated hypotheses, ordinary people all over the world are starting to notice the effects of global warming. In High Tide, British journalist Mark Lynas visits global hot spots to record people's reactions and sound a clarion call for action. Readers looking for a "we are the world" approach to climate change may be taken aback by Lynas' flat expression of the uncomfortable truth: "Every time America votes, the world holds its breath.... Climate change begins and ends in America." Lynas damns the George W. Bush administration for undermining global efforts such as the Kyoto Protocol as well as actively preventing innovation within the United States that would reduce auto and industrial emissions. But High Tide isn't the firs or the best book to do that; instead, its narrative strength is in the riveting stories of how small towns, islands, riverside cities, and rural areas are being slowly destroyed. Gardeners in England will be unable to grow heritage plant species within the next 75 years. The Alaskan permafrost is melting, as temperatures there increase "ten times faster than in the rest of the world." An entire Pacific Island nation--Tuvalu--will soon disappear beneath the rising sea, leaving its people homeless. Lynas visits Alaska, Tuvalu, Peru, China, and the east coast of the United States, documenting the lives, places, and cultures that will be lost in the decades to come. Thankfully, just when hopelessness threatens to overwhelm the reader, High Tide offers a five-step plan to mitigate the most catastrophic effects of global climate change. Every step in the plan involves action by United States citizens and their elected representatives, offering American activists and visionaries a chance to do penance for wrecking parts of the world far from our own driveways. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly

Deeply disturbed by unprecedented rain and catastrophic flooding in his native England, journalist Lynas set out on a three-year journey to bear witness to global climate change. Traveling to Alaska to see vanishing tundra, to the growing deserts of Inner Mongolia, to a tiny Pacific island nation facing devastation from rising ocean levels and finally to disappearing glaciers in Peru, Lynas vividly describes the physical and human toll our fossil fuelâ€"based culture takes on the planet. Not a scientist himself, Lynas bolsters his case with abundant footnoted scientific references. This is both personal journey and fierce polemic. Much of his political argument and ire is directed squarely at the U.S. In Lynas's view, the U.S., through its domestic and foreign policy, has undermined the valiant efforts of a coalition of developed and developing countries to control and even reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which the first Bush administration threatened to boycott had there been any agreement that included mandatory restrictions, through what he sees as the Clinton policy of "green" lip service, to the second Bush administration's 2001 unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, Lynas portrays a government in league with carbon-producing and -consuming industrialists bent on promoting a vision "that what is good for oil corporations is good for Americaâ€"and, by extensionâ€"the world." In prose that is deeply felt and poignant, if sometimes awkward, Lynas makes no concession to evenhandedness in his assessment of the status quo. With a closing section including a six-point manifesto for addressing the global warming crisis and a comprehensive appendix listing information sources, advocacy groups and Web sites, this could well serve as a primer for budding antiâ€"global-warming activists. 6 pages of illus., maps not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (June 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312303653
• ISBN-13: 978-0312303655
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,305,693 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sobering stories but naive solutions, March 4, 2006

By 

Erik D. Curren (Staunton, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (Paperback)

Mark Lynas traveled around the world to find tangible symptoms of global warming. He found them indeed, and some of them are truly heartbreaking. From the Pacific islanders who are preparing to abandon their island home, to the Alaskans in crazy, tilting houses over a foundation of melting permafrost, to the author's own flooding England, the stories hit home. It's hard to deny global warming after this.

But Lynas, like many environmental activists, falls flat on his solutions. For example, he says that because burning any more oil will worsen warming, "there should be a worldwide halt to the exploration and development of new oil, coal and gas reserves, because even existing reserves should never be burned as fuel." In his fear of warming, Lynas doesn't consider the immediate human suffering that such a rash course would create. It seems like he doesn't know--or doesn't care--how much our society relies on oil, not only for 90% of our transportation but for much of our food, pharmaecuticals, and other life-critical applications. For civilization to continue, we need a gradual, orderly draw-down from fossil fuels, not a crashing halt.

It might comfort Lynas to know that we'll have to get off oil anyway even without global warming, because cheap oil is fast running out. Those remaining reserves will be so much more difficult and expensive to pump than our oil today that we'll never even have a chance to use them up. And just as supply peaks, there's rising demand from China and India. $10 a gallon gas will get us off oil more quickly than fear of warming. But then our society will face other problems--including potential political collapse--that will make it all the more difficult to deal with warming. For more realistic talk on energy, I'd look to books on "peak oil" such as James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" or Richard Heinberg's "Power Down."

Lynas is just as naive in his approach to politics, assuming that if people--especially Americans, who emit most greenhouse gases--learn the facts, they'll all start thinking and acting like greenies. Yet we all know that the biggest barrier to stopping global warming is not lack of scientific knowlege or even popular awareness, but economic and political short-sightedness. The rich don't want to change their ways, and they'll use power, influence, and corruption to preserve their wealth, warming be damned. For a more nuanced look, try the Ehrlichs' "One with Nineveh." They talk about changes in government and business that will have to happen to save the earth, showing a much more complete understanding of the human-nature equation than does Lynas, who sees retreating glaciers more clearly than he sees expanding markets.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Review of the Current State of the World, March 27, 2008

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R. Watts (Lewisville, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (Paperback)

High Tide is amazing, not for predicting the future of the planet, but for telling you, in very personal terms, what is happening in the world today. I spent 14 years in and out of Alaska and became very well acquainted with the entire state, but have not returned since 1987. I was absolutely shocked at how our Northernmost state is suffering from the 10 (!) degree rise in temperature which is melting the permafrost. The resulting damage to homes, forests, native life, and other facets of an incredibly beautiful state deeply saddens me and gives me a strong urge to do something serious about global warming. This book really makes global warming upfront, real, and personal without preaching or supplying solutions. Things are simply reported the way they are without predjudice. I highly recommend it. Our politicians should be duct-taped to chairs and forced to read this book.

Once you have become thoroughly depressed by reading the state of the world in "High Tide", by all means obtain a copy of "Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming" by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn. That book gives an outlook on all of the alternative means of producing energy that have a zero or low carbon footprint. Good Reading.

28 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Withdrawal symptoms, July 12, 2004

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Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (Paperback)

Although many studies of climate change and its impact have been published, few count the human cost. Mark Lynas makes up for that oversight in this vividly presented account. As a journalist, he's unconstrained by the limitations of long-term data sets, political reaction to his personal findings or peer group pressure. He travels the globe, even to the point of last minute flight bookings, to observe conditions. His approach is to confront people and ask about their experiences with changing weather over the years. The method is direct, straightforward and revealing. What it demonstrates is more than startling, it's devastating.

While the scientists debate the temperature rise rate or the intensity of this or that storm, around the planet people are living through the conditions of warming climate. Tuvalu residents, on their miniscule island chain in mid-Pacific, are watching the land wash away. It isn't just that melting ice caps are raising sea levels and ruining crops. There are more frequent and more devastating storms occuring. In China, land is also moving, but the reason is the opposite - the rains have ceased and the land is dried and blowing away in fierce desert winds. The account of a lone woman, the last survivor of a village overwhelmed by drought, is more poignant [to me] than anything found in fiction. And the number of such stories is growing.

If a most gripping part of this book must be chosen, it is Lynas' tour of Peru and the Cordillera Blanca glaciers. His father, a geologist, had visited the area three decades before, camera in hand. Huge glaciers, akin to frozen waterfalls, fill the images. With those photos in his knapsack, Lynas trudges up the slopes, racked by Alititude Sickness, to record any changes. His expression at the sight cannot be repeated here, a signal of his shock - and ours at his comparative photographs. The glaciers are gone! Lynas takes us through a litany of rivers of ice that are withdrawing from long established limits. The withdrawal has a dual results - not enough snow is feeding their growth, and the meltwater is no longer available to nourish human populations. He asks: what will the citizens of Lima do when there is no more water to drink? Lynas avoids prediction of furture El Ninos' impact on these conditions. He's hardly blameable for that. Some observations on North America's depletion of the Ogalalla Aquifer, only partly attributable to overuse of fossil fuels, however, would have been useful.

It is fossil fuel consumption that stands charged, indeed declared guilty by Lynas, as the culprit in these events. The tumultuous clouds of auto exhausts are the major source of gases rising into our atmosphere, choking off proper heat exchange mechanisms. The contributions of the oil industry to politicians short circuits any political action to curb these emmissions. Hence, Tuvalu is being swept away, China is choking with dust and Lima, Peru will soon be seeking homes for its million citizens. But the United States, the world's greatest and most persistent polluter, decrys or subverts all efforts to quell the output of their millions of vehicles, while assiduously searching for more to burn.

Lynas is unequivical in his denunciations. At the same time, he invokes response from his readers to take action. Pollution increases can be curbed, he argues in his conclusion. It is you who must take the first steps. America, he stresses, must follow the lead of the European Union. Ratification of the Kyoto Protocol is the first step - a committment to stop, then reduce emissions. "Contraction and convergence" policies must be implemented as a means of reducing emissions with a minimal impact on economies. The quest for new supplies of fossil fuels must cease and the funds used to promote alternative energy sources. Individual actions, amazingly easy small steps, must be taken and imparting to others the need follow your example spreads the message. "Don't be scared to speak out!", he warns. Who should read his warning message? Anyone who breathes - and wishes to continue breathing. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]