Amazon.com Review
It's time to stop talking about the weather and do something about it. Paranormal superstars Art Bell and Whitley Strieber bring environmentalism to the masses tabloid-style in The Coming Global Superstorm, a quick look at global warming and its potentially catastrophic effects. Like Old Testament prophets, Bell and Strieber embrace lovingly detailed depictions of global cataclysm; unlike them, our modern-day doomsayers have more to go on than that old-time religion. Their writing is clear and straightforward, interspersing hard data with dramatization and speculation to create an engaging, enjoyable, but thoroughly spooky warning of the next Ice Age.
Scoffers would do well to remember the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, despite the clear warnings--we may have advanced our meteorological knowledge over the 20th century, but is our judgment any better? Bell and Strieber are ultimately optimistic that quick behavior change can avert the big storm for a while, even if archaeological evidence suggests its inevitability. Their solutions range from the small scale (buy fuel-efficient cars) to the grandiose (global cooperation in weather monitoring). Whether their suggestions will help is a moot question (how could we ever know?); surely, though, they won't hurt. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
The message is very scary and convincing: humankind has so polluted the environment that the world's weather is about to react by taking a "ferocious" turn. But the messengers delivering this news seem a bit flaky: Strieber wrote of his own alien abduction episode in Communion; Bell, a late-night radio talk-show host, regularly covers such topics as UFOs, government conspiracies and near-death experiences. They present an imagined sequence for the catastrophic "superstorm," threatening a possible "extinction event" for humans. It's like Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds, only we're fighting the weather instead of Martians. Interspersed with this alarmist scenario are many credible facts about the effects of trapped greenhouse gasses, as well as explanations of how quickly our ecosystem has deteriorated in this century. Reading, the authors are very grave indeed, lending an otherwise dry scientific topic a heightened sense of dramaAand making it play as a thriller on tape. Simultaneous release with the Pocket hardcover. (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
