Customer Reviews

A World Without Ice

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Dr Pollack clarifies the climate change issue in calm terms: By 2030 the ice will be gone and with it the way we have been living for the last 10,000 years. Up until now, civilization thrived downstream from glaciers, bathing in and drinking from the seasonal ice melt that also fed crops and animals which in turn fed us. When the glaciers and ice caps vanish, nature turns the tap off, leaving us in a challenging situation.

More importantly, Dr Pollack also explains why ice is such an important barometer of climate change. Ice is, he explains, very close to its melting point, so the slightest change in CO2 levels triggers an immediate response from the glaciers. A warming earth triggers a rise in sea levels, as water expands when it gets warmer. A warming earth also holds less landmass moisture as the earth loses more and more water to evaporation. Millions of people will be displaced by these events and Dr Pollock makes it quite clear that we are not ready for the greatest challenge that civilization has ever faced.

'A World Without Ice' by Henry Pollack provides a well-rounded introduction to the most important change arising due to global warming - the loss of substantial amounts of earth's ice. The account is highly readable and entertaining, in addition to providing a clear summary of how far this process is already advanced and where it will likely lead. The changes already under way include substantial loss of high elevation glaciation at low latitudes (Kilimanjaro is projected to be ice-free by 2020 etc.). As the book makes clear, the most disruptive changes for humans involve the loss of ice near the earth's poles. Dr. Pollack shows that reasonable projections of the warming process reveal a potential for sea level rising by tens of feet or more, with an accompanying displacement of hundreds of millions of people.
The book is also really entertaining and informative. Dr Pollack is not reluctant to digress into fascinating areas of human and geological history, which makes this a pleasure to read. He provides unique insights into the scientific process and the careful record-keeping which has brought us to our current understanding of geologic history (how fundamentally the earth has changed, in often cataclysmic ways), and how clear the evidence really is for a recent departure from historic trends, coinciding with the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the industrial era.
Dr. Pollack does not pull his punches in regard to the tactics of the 'climate contras', pointing out for example their reliance on non-peer-reviewed venues to make attacks and try to stimulate doubts concerning the scientific evidence for warming. The book makes clear that the case for global warming due to human environmental influence emerges as a result of a fully developed scientific discipline, while the claims of the climate contras do not. This book does an excellent job of clarifying this, illuminating the role of ice in the changes which have and will occur, and also provides a sober assessment of the challenges of addressing climate change.

If your mind is already made up about global warming, you don't need to buy this book. On the other hand, if you think that the question is too important to leave to the talking heads on television, then you might consider facts and arguments in this thoughtful, cautious book.

"A World Without Ice" is like a good conversation with a kindly professor who is willing to discuss all the uncertainties and conditionals in the complex arguments about global warming.

Ice been a feature of the planet for thousands of years. What is happening to it has been studied by historians, archaeologists, geologists, biologists, meteorologists and thousands of other scientists. The overwhelming evidence is that glaciers and icecaps are diminishing - exactly how and why is becoming clearer with each passing year. This important book offers an easily understandable introduction to evaluating the evidence for yourself.

After an urgent foreword by Al Gore, this 2009 book starts out leisurely, presenting a history of Antarctica and of ice in general. The relaxed "ice tour" goes on for about a hundred pages, covering many fascinating subjects: Captain Cook's voyages, other Antarctic and Arctic exploration, Mars ice, earth's fluctuating periods of more ice and less ice, the Pleistocene and the rise of mankind, etc.

By around page 100, Professor Pollack has made a convincing case that our present global warming is mainly anthropogenic (human caused), and has also noted some of its effects specifically on the world's ice. Starting on page 107, in a section called "The Trenches of Denial," he gets urgent, now using combative language to describe the "climate contrarians" and their sad lies. He proceeds to refute them in detail.

On page 116 Pollack makes this forecast: "... at the present rate of loss, ice will disappear from equatorial Africa [the fabled "snows of Kilimanjaro"] by 2020." Wow. 2020. That's tomorrow, and it will be one shocking milestone. Will the deniers awake from their slumbers then? Hard to say. As Pollack notes, a somewhat similar shocking event has already occurred (with barely a shrug from many people): in August 2000, the North Pole itself was discovered to be without ice, for the first time in many years. It was just open water there at the top of the world. More unusual and worrisome still, "the sea ice had been very thin and peppered with polynyas [pools of open water] all the way to the pole" (p. 122). Yes, "all the way to the pole."

Here are a few of the book's many important statistical passages: "The fraction of Greenland's [glacial] area that undergoes summer melting is 30 percent greater today [2008] than it was only 30 years ago...." (p. 118). And this one, also about Greenland, where the ice is thousands of feet thick: "The ice on this large island ... is equivalent to more than twenty feet of sea-level change, were it to return to the sea" (p. 118). And this one, on both Greenland and Antarctica: " ... there is [now] an ongoing ice mass loss tied to an acceleration of the glaciers draining the interior. The ice deficit for Antarctica has also increased, by 75 percent over the past several years, principally because of accelerating glacial flow following the disintegration of floating ice shelves around the continent" (p. 120). In other words, the fragmentation and disappearance of those peripheral ice shelves is now opening the way for some of Antarctica's vast mass of glacial land ice to flow into the sea. Pollack even gives his own eyewitness account of seeing, off Antarctica in 2007, an iceberg so huge, 31 miles long by 12 miles wide, that it was literally a floating "ice island" (p. 123). Once rare, such ice islands are increasing in numbers as the ice shelves break up. He also notes an inevitable lack of uniformity in the melting: "A recent survey of all the outlet glaciers around Antarctica shows little net loss of ice from East Antarctica ... but substantial and increasing ice loss from West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula" (p. 126). Those latter (and warmer) two areas, though much smaller than East Antarctica, are still enormous in size and contain trillions of tons of ice.

Some climate change skeptics today trumpet the fact that central/East Antarctica's ice cap is apparently now stable, or is even thickening very slightly. Pollack acknowledges that the vast Antarctic ice cap is still extremely cold and is not likely to melt anytime soon (p. 257). So, no "world without ice" this century at least.

But what does that matter, the book asks, when the (northern) Arctic ice sheet, the vast Greenland glaciers, and the glaciers of the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas and the Antarctic Peninsula are all now melting at accelerating rates? Would stable ice, or a little extra ice, on the Antarctic ice cap somehow balance things out? No. It won't help billions of people living in the tropics and mid-latitudes who depend so much on the rivers that flow through their lands - rivers that will dry up when the glaciers that feed them melt completely away. And it won't help all the people and cities located on low islands and coastal plains that will be flooded out by a sea level rise of merely a meter or two.

Moreover, that slight increase in East Antarctic snowfall and icepack has now apparently been traced to the ongoing, years-long drought in neighboring Australia (according to Feb. 2010 science reports, not mentioned in this 2009 book). So there's no net gain to celebrate. What goes up (moisture), must come down, even if somewhere else. It's called a "precipitation shift," and 20 million Aussies are not thrilled with the trade-off: they get more deserts and bush fires.

Back to sea level rise: "... during the twentieth century, sea level on Earth rose about eight inches" (p. 127). That may not seem much, but it's now on track to increase greatly. "If ice spillage to the sea continues throughout this [21st] century at the rate observed in its first decade, enough ice will enter the oceans to raise sea level three feet" (p. 258). Having said that, Pollack then stresses that the rate is virtually certain to increase even more.

Likewise, average world temperature has risen nearly 1 degree C (nearly 2 F) over the past 150 years. But that seemingly minor rise includes several recent accelerations: "... during the past 50 years, Earth warmed 2.8 times faster than the 150-year rate, and over the past 25 years, almost 4 times faster" (p. 256). And in the crucial polar regions, temperature has risen not just one, but several degrees C over the past century.

Near the end of his book, Pollack warns that the 2007 IPCC report that predicted a sea level rise of "ten to thirty inches" by the end of the 21st century was actually too conservative (pp. 214, 227, 258). Although already worrisome enough, it focused only on the effect of seawater expanding due to a rise in its temperature, and on meltwaters gradually running off land-bound glaciers into the seas. It ignored the possibility of those glaciers themselves sliding directly into the sea as bulk ice: a process fueled by warmer seawater lapping at their edges, by surface meltwater penetrating to the bottom of the glaciers and thus lubricating their undersides, by the disintegration of the floating ice shelves that help to hold the glaciers in place, and by plain old gravity. The process, he notes, has increasingly been observed in recent years in Greenland and West Antarctica, but because that process is so recent, the IPCC decided against considering it as a factor in the report (p. 227).

Our oceans could easily rise ten to thirty FEET in this 21st century, given the accelerating rate at which glacial ice is now slipping seaward. Just drop an ice cube into a glass of water and watch what happens, instantly. As Pollack chillingly notes, nature's own processes very often build up to "tipping points" of radical change (p. 255), including such known prehistoric events as "an eight-foot rise of sea level in only fifty years, most likely due to extremely rapid sloughing of ice into the sea" (p. 263).

Pollack offers some urgent strategies to reduce global warming and its negative effects on us, among them: "energy conservation and efficiency measures in transportation, manufacturing, household appliances, and buildings" (p. 247). He gives many specific everyday examples. He also advocates a major switch to alternative energies: solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, nuclear, etc. And he recommends slowing and even stopping world population growth.

(I'll just add a few more suggestions: relocate cities inland, away from low-lying coasts; build lots of desalination plants soon; and, finally, befriend and persuade any climate change deniers you happen to meet.)

This book was clearly written for the layman. My guess is that it is aimed at those who either doubt that man-made global warming is happening, or those who are trying to convince such people that it is happening. Those who are already familiar with the reality of anthropogenic global warming may not learn new facts from this book, but they might learn new ways of arguing their position when confronting doubters. Rather than overwhelming the reader with graphs and statistics, Dr. Pollack presents just the essential data in clear, concise forms.

Today's high school students will likely live to see the full impact of global heating (my preferred term... heat is melting the ice now, and the real warming will begin when the ice is gone). This book is good material for high school science students, in my opinion. I hope it can become a big influence on the young, whose lifestyles, including consumer choices, are still in their formative stages.

If you want a well-written, highly-readable explanation of the science behind global warming, here it is.

Do you know exactly how carbon dioxide and methane trap heat? Do you know how glaciers work and why you should care? Do you know why scientists are so concerned about warming? I didn't either, but now I do. There are a lot of great explanations in this book.

I appreciated the lack of polemics in this book. Despite the sensational title, the author merely presents the science in a calm and reasoned way. Only at the very end of the book does he give a call to action - and by that time it will likely be obvious to you that urgent action is called for.

The only fault I find with the book is that, for me personally, the author takes the topic a little too broadly. He takes little side trips into related matters or personal interest stories. I skimmed over these, eager to get the main facts.

Even if you are a doubter, you owe it to yourself as an educated person to read at least one book that clearly explains the scientific case for human-caused warming. This would be a good choice. Pollack addresses the major critiques of warming in a way I found convincing.

I was interested in Al Gore's film Inconvenient Truth. But he never explained to me why I should care, what is really at stake, what is supposed to happen in the future. A World without Ice gave me the extra information I needed to understand this issue.

Another excellent book on the topic: Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, published by National Geographic. It's a very readable summary of the scientific evidence.

For info about technological solutions, this PBS NOVA show describes possible solutions: Nova: Power Surge: Are We Finally on the Brink of a Clean Energy Revolution?.

A World Without Ice is certainly an important and informative book, as the author makes the case that without immediate and substantial action into curtailing our combustion of coal, natural gas, and petroleum fuels, we will undoubtedly melt all the polar ice and glaciers in the world this century. This, of course, will raise our sea level hundreds of feet, resulting in God knows what types of problems in the world. Imagine starving refugees flooding the borders, and that's probably just a start. Rather than being an alarmist, the author strikes me as level-headed and "having done his homework".

One could say "balderdash", or some other stronger language, but the reality is that in the earth's near past, high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have done exactly what the author predicts - melt all the ice caps in the world. The reasons why this "natural" event is no longer acceptable include:

1) We are the cause of the carbon dioxide build-up this time; and we can stop the CO2 build-up if we wanted to;

2) Lots and lots of people live below two hundred feet elevation, and they will want somewhere else to live; and

3) A hotter world is not that great for growing food for billions of people, due to droughts at times, and unstoppable flooding at other times. (A warming planet is both drier when it doesn't rain, and wetter when it does finally get around to raining, due to more heat in the air, and also more water vapor in the heated air).

And yes, I've studied climate science since 1978, long before it became fashionable, so I know what I'm talking about, as does the author. Be a skeptic at your own peril.

The book can lapse into a type of academic approach at times, although it is certainly readable to the average person. Also recommended are the following four books on global warming and its consequences: "Hell and High Water" by Joseph Romm; "With Speed and Violence - Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change" by Fred Pearce; "Boiling Point" by Ross Gelbspan; and "Storms of My Grandchildren" by James Hansen.

Henry Pollack organized this book very well. He starts with an introduction of the discovery of ice and then discusses the importance of ice. He describes how ice is such an essential part of the creation of earth because of its special properties. After all the background information he finally discusses how humans have impacted ice on earth and how the melting of ice will eventually impact us. He reinforces his argument with series of case studies that was conducted by him, even though his credentials are pretty impressive as is. Pollack makes the book easy to read by giving simple analogies to the complicated processes and makeup of ice along with climate change. There are some background information that are not necessary for the understanding of ice but it seems he uses it to support his argument. Pollack analyzes climate change and ice melt not only from his views but from skeptics as well, he provides three trenches of denial and provides an argument against them. Pollack gives a list of things that ordinary people, who the book is written for, can do to attempt to slow climate change and eventually stop human impact on climate change. In the end he encourages the everyday person to rise up to the challenge and stop this problem that will affect everyone and everyone's future.

I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this one. The author did a great job in summarizing the delicate processes that take place on earth and how humans affect them. Comes complete with footnotes.

I was initially attracted by the beautiful cover, but found that indeed this book could be judged on more than its cover; it has a lot of other merits. It's clear and understandable to a non-scientist. In fact, I found it the perfect book to help me understand all those areas of climate science, hydrological cycles, and global warming that in prior readings and attempts to educate myself had led to confusion or the dreaded eyes glazing over. Now I know what I need to know about ice, glaciers and climate change, enough to know why it matters and why I should care, right now. Enough to follow the arguments between supporters and deniers and know where I stand. This book is an excellent choice for the average reader who wants to get up to speed on the significant environmental issues of our times. It is very suitable for undergraduate course readings.