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Sam Choe
Author's Bio
None Provided
The Dangers of Global Warming
The author of the Field Notes from a Catastrophe Man, Nature, and Climate
Change is Elizabeth Kolbert, who was born in 1961 and spent her early
childhood in the Bronx. When she was in kindergarten, her family relocated
to Larchmont, New York, where she remained until 1979. After graduating
high school, Kolbert spent four years studying literature at Yale
University. In 1983, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at
the Universitat-Hamburg, in Germany. When Kolbert returned to New York at
the end of 1984, she joined the Times. In 1999, she left the Times to join
the staff of The New Yorker. Joining The New Yorker forced her to learn to
write all over again. At The New Yorker, Kolbert has written articles about
high-profile politicians. In 2001, Kolbert spent a year on assignment in
Greenland, researching ice coring. The experience presented the perfect
opportunity for her to tackle global warming, a topic that had interested
her since 1989. Her research resulted in The Climate of Man a three-part
series which was published in The New Yorker in April 2005 and won the
American Association's Award for the Advancement of Science.
Field Notes from a Catastrophe Man, Nature, And Climate Change, by
Elizabeth Kolbert, deals with the global warming that has been endangering
our world for several decades. The book tells the reader to how she was
concerned about the dramatic change of the world's temperature, the
dangers posed by the Earth's increasing temperature and the difficulty of
communicating the urgency of the problem to the public. "My hope is that
this book will be read by everyone, by which I mean not only those who
follow the latest news about the climate but also those who prefer to skip
over it."1 While most writing on climate change has relied on dry data and
statistics, Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe is a vivid,
technicolor reportage. In the book, she presents several reports in first
person and describes the situations in detailed expeditions with some of
the world's top climate scientists to Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska. She
explains the science behind the issue, draws frightening parallels to lost
ancient civilizations, unpacks the politics, and presents the personal
stories of those who are being affected the most.
The people who make their homes near the poles are in an eerie
foreshadowing, watching their worlds disappear. The Alaskan Village of
Shishmaref sits on an island known as Sarichef, five miles off the coast of
the Seward Peninsula. Sarichef is a small island and Shishmaref is
basically the only thing on it. Traditionally, the men in Shishmaref hunted
for seals by driving out over the sea ice with dogsleds or more recently,
on snowmobiles. However, in the early 1990s, the hunters began to notice
that the sea ice was changing. The ice was starting to form later in the
fall and breaking up earlier in the spring, making it too dangerous to hunt
using snowmobiles. Soon, the changes in the sea ice brought other problems.
At its highest point, Shishmaref is only 22 feet above sea levels, and the
houses, most of which were built by the U.S. government, are small, boxy,
and not particularly sturdy. A storm in October 1997 scoured away a 125
foot wide strip from the town's northern edge- several houses were
destroyed and more than a dozen had to be relocated. During another storm,
in October 2001, the village was threatened by twelve-foot waves. Taking
action, residents of Shishmaref voted in the summer of 2002 to move the
entire village to the mainland - a relocation that cost the U.S. government
$180 million. Soon another island called Romanovsky disappeared down the
sea and when Romanovsky emerged from the ocean, Kolbert took a walk around
the island. Apparently, it had been a nesting site for birds in the spring,
because everywhere she went there were bits of eggshell and piles of
droppings. The island was only about 10 feet above sea level, and at the
edges it dropped off sharply into the water. Romanovsky pointed out a spot
along the shore where the previous summer a series of ice wedges had been
exposed. They have since melted, and the ground behind them has given way
in a cascade of black mud. In a few years, he said, he expected more ice
wedges would be exposed, and then these would melt, causing further
erosion. Although the process was different in its mechanics from what was
going on in Shishmaref, it had much the same cause and, according to
Romanovsky, was likely to have the same result. "Another disappearing
island, it's moving very, very fast." 2 And not only are Shishmaref and
Romanovsky disappearing, but many islands and countries are feeling the
threats and dangers of global warming.
Kolbert mentions one of the major effects of the global warming Kolbert
mentions is the melting of ice. On September 18, 1997, Des Groseilliers, a
318-foot-long icebreaker with a bright red hull, set out from the town of
Tuktoyakruk on the Beaufort Sea, and headed north under overcast skies.
Crew members were stunned at how much smaller the ice had become. NASA,
using satellites equipped with microwave sensors, has made the most precise
measurements of Arctic sea ice. In 1979, the satellite data showed
perennial sea ice covering 1.7 billion acres, or an area the size of the
continental United States. The ice's extent varies from year to year, but
since then the overall trend has been strongly going downward. The losses
have been particularly great in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. By now, the
perennial sea ice has shrunk by roughly 250 million acres, an area the size
of New York, Georgia, and Texas combined. The people from Des Groseilliers
noticed that the ice, which was about nine feet in 1979, was just six feet
thick, and in some spots just three. By August 1998, so many of the
scientists had fallen through that a new requirement was added to the
protocol: anyone who set foot off the ship had to wear a life jacket. The
melting of the ice is dangerous to the earth's atmosphere since greenhouse
gases come from it, such as carbon dioxide and methane. Also, Kolbert says
that the active layer, which can be anywhere from a few inches to a few
feet deep, freezes in the winter but thaws over the summer. Life in the
active layer proceeds much as it does in more temperate regions, with one
critical difference: temperatures are so low that when trees and grasses
die they do not fully decompose. New plants grow on top of the half-rotted
old ones, and when these plants die the same thing happens all over again.
This process is known as cryoturbation. Because of the low temperatures,
the plants are frozen before they're rotted, being saved under the ice.
However, it can run in reverse if the temperature starts to change because
thawing permafrost could make the active layer more hospitable to plants,
which are a sink for carbon. No one knows exactly how much carbon is stored
in the world's permafrost, but estimates run as high as 450 billion metric
tons. So Kolbert describes global warming as "riding my bike around here,
You ride by all these pastures and they've got a big boulder sitting there
on this rolling hill. You can't just go by this boulder. You've got to
try to push. So you start rocking it, and you get a bunch of friends, and
they start rocking it, and finally it starts moving. And then you realize,
Maybe this wasn't the best idea. That's what we're doing as a society.
This climate, if it starts rolling, we don't really know where it will
stop." 3 Like the boulder rolling down the hill, she believes that global
warming will continue to hurt the earth.
The exposure of carbon can cause some changes to earth's temperature. One
Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, who is regarded as one of the giants of
nineteenth-century science, decided to actually calculate how the earth's
temperature would be affected by changing carbon levels. He would later
describe this task as one of the most tedious of his life. "I have not
worked this hard since I was cramming for my B.A."4 Finally, in December
1895, he was ready to present his conclusions to the Swedish Academy. By
today's standards, Arrhenius's work seems primitive. All of his
calculations were performed using pen and paper. Arrhenius asked what would
happen to the earth's climate if carbon levels were halved and also if
they were doubled. In the case of doubling, he determined that average
global temperatures would rise between nine and eleven degrees, a result
that approximates the estimates of the most sophisticated climate models in
operation today. Arrhenius was also responsible for a key conceptual
breakthrough. All over Europe, factories and railroads and power stations
were burning coal and belching out smoke. Arrhenius recognized that
industrialization and climate change were intimately related, and that the
consumption of fossil fuels must, over time, lead to warming. He was not,
however, terribly concerned about this, believing that the buildup of
carbon dioxide in the air would be extremely slow. Most chemists and
scientists until the 1970s shared his optimistic views. Although an Irish
physicist named John Tyndall found the global warming in the late 1850, it
was not until 1970s that its effects were recognized.
Swiss Camp is a research station that was set up in 1990 on a platform
drilled into the Greenland ice sheet and Kolbert arrived at the camp in
late May 2004. Konrad Steffen, a professor of geography at University of
Colorado, is the director of Swiss Camp. He had spent the last fourteen
summers at Swiss Camp, and when Kolbert asked him what he had learned
during that time, he said, "What the regional models tell us is that we
will get more melt at the coast. It will continue to melt. But warmer air
can hold most water vapor, and at the top of the ice sheet you'll get more
precipitation... We'll get an imbalance of having more accumulation at the
top, and more melt at the bottom. The key question now is: What is the
dominant one, the more melt of the increase?" 5 More than 80 percent of
Greenland is covered by ice. Locked into this enormous glacier is eight
percent of the world's fresh water supply. The record of the Greenland ice
cores have been collected continuously. However the Greenland ice cores
stop providing reliable information right around the start of the last
glaciations. It was thus found that the temperatures often swung wildly.
Through this kind of experiments and reports around the world, Kolbert
explains the dangers of the global warming throughout the book.
Kolbert's thesis is solid, built on dozens of similar stories about a
global climatic catastrophe. By using firsthand information, historical
facts, and other scientists and chemists' opinions, she establishes her
goal in letting know others of the threats that have been occurring because
of us and the global warming that has been warming the earth for numerous
years. She mentions directly and indirectly of the dangers that are coming
rapidly onto us. "You can tip and then you'll just go back. You can tip
it and just go back. And then you tip it and you get to the other stable
state, which is upside down." 6 She says that if we don't start to
prepare and try to stop the global warming, all the arctic will melt during
our generation.
Since Kolbert is a journalist, she may be biased. She may be exaggerating
the state of global warming. Numerous scientists are unaware about global
warming and believe that it's occurring very slowly. However, according to
Kolbert, it's happening very rapidly and says that it will be very
destructive to us in a very short of time. Her book is also based on other
scientists' observations and knowledge and the previous scientists who
influenced this field of science, not her own. Therefore, she may be
influenced by those peoples' point of view and may have obtained some
biased point of views toward global warming from them. "On the basis of
Zwally's findings, I argued that if greenhouse gas emissions are not
controlled, the total disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet should be
set in motion in a matter of decades." 7 The two reviews on this book by
Denis Hayes and Mariana Gosnel commented on the book's clarity and quality
of information that has been obtained in first person. The reviews also
described how well Kolbert organized the book and how well she presented
the facts persuading.
The book has numerous strengths and weaknesses. First, the strengths of the
book are that it had countless first-hand observations, facts and
information. It contained specific information of several historical giant
scientists, such as John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius, and Charles David
Keeling, and how they influenced the field of global warming. "John
Tyndall set out to study the absorptive properties of various gases. What
he discovered let him to propose the first accurate account of how the
atmosphere functions."8 Therefore, the book made the readers able to
understand easily and realize how dangerous and threatening global warming
is becoming. However, the book also had some weaknesses in that its
information was not focused on one fact, but on many, making the reader
confused. Therefore, it did not connect the chapters to chapters very well.
Also it included several of other scientists' perspectives while almost
none of hers. The book describes how global warming was perceived back in
the 1800s and how it's changed since then. The book changed previously
held values, practices, and ideas by providing important facts and
information that made the book inevitable to ignore. It'll probably have a
great impact on society today because the book brought up some facts that
we have been ignoring for a long time and the causes and effects of global
warming are impacting and spreading very rapidly around the world.
Overall, Kolbert uses Field Notes from a Catastrophe Man, Nature, And
Climate Change to emphasize how global warming may affect our generation
any time. She wants the readers to recognize the truth and the facts about
the dangers of global warming. "It's important to acknowledge the many
uncertainties that exist."9 It has been affecting the world and has been
destroying several small islands that have been depending on the ice.
Global Warming is manifesting through out the world and it's setting the
earth's a temperature to higher and higher degree each day and all should
realize how important it is.
Endnotes
1. Kolbert, Elizabeth 3
2. Kolbert, Elizabeth 24
3. Kolbert, Elizabeth 34
4. Kolbert, Elizabeth 40
5. Kolbert, Elizabeth 48
6. Kolbert, Elizabeth 34
7. Kolbert, Elizabeth 55
8. Kolbert, Elizabeth 35
9. Kolbert, Elizabeth 193
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