Field Notes from A Catastrophe

There are no comforting stories about climate change. It’s time we acknowledge that. We all read the New York Magazine article. We’ve all heard about the diseases hiding in the icebergs, just waiting to be released from their icy prison. The panic is real and it is spreading.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe takes a slightly more measured tone as she details her scientific and anthropological exploration of the subject. Her book is split into three parts. The first two, Nature and Man, were written for the first edition of the book, published in 2006, and the third, Time, is made up of a series of articles Kolbert wrote for the New Yorker, published in 2006, 2007, and 2008. In essence, Nature discusses the proof we have that the climate is changing; Man discusses our relationship with that information; and Time explores what has and hasn’t changed since the first two sections were written and published.
Nature, I must say, lulls you into a false sense of security. Kolbert interviews the studiers of butterflies and mosquitoes, glaciers and permafrost who show her how those things are changing. And yes, changing much more rapidly now than they have in recorded history. But while the intellectually curious can make the jump from how rapidly butterfly migration patterns have changed over the past century to our rapidly disintegrating climate system, there’s something about the methodical explanation of experiments, her illustrative descriptions of the various characters she’s met, and her narrative style which helps. You thought you were going to be panicking and instead, she’s just laying out the evidence and the evidence happens to be butterflies.
The evidence continues to build in the “Man” section of the book, and nowhere is it more clear then when they start talking about CFCs, otherwise known as that compound that used to be in hairspray cans (and other aerosols, as well as refrigeration and air conditioners) that put a hole in the ozone layer. The discussion of that process — studying the compounds and realizing their impact on our ability to live on this planet — also happened to produced one of my favorite quotes from the book.
“F. Sherwood Rowland, who shared the Nobel Prize with Crutzen [for their work on ozone depletion], came home one night and told his wife, ‘The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.’”
As Kolbert points out, we were in fact able to solve that problem. CFCs themselves didn’t turn out to be the end of the world. But now we’ve run headlong into a problem in the opposite direction. Now, we trap too much in our atmosphere. And without losing her methodical, measured tone, Kolbert spends the last two sections carefully laying out a pretty dire case.
You may be asking yourself now, as I was when I was reading — “wait a second, if the case was that dire ten years ago, what the hell is going on now??” And I’m here to tell you that that is the scariest part of this book.
Kolbert writes the following when discussing how U.S. participation in the Kyoto agreement fell apart:
“In February 2005, Greg Nickels, the mayor of Seattle began to circulate a set of principles that he called the “U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.” Within four months, more than a hundred and seventy mayors presenting some thirty-six million people, had signed on, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York; Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver, and Mayro Manuel Diaz of Miami.”
Sound familiar? If you google “U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement,” the third article that comes up is one from 2017 — “Mayors, Sidestepping Trump, Vow to Fill Void on Climate Change.” Mayor Hickenlooper is now Governor Hickenlooper of Colorado, but other than that, not much has changed. What Kolbert does, in an unimpeachably calm and objective tone, is to show us the perils of stasis. Without active steps on a variety of issues, the climate will continue to change rapidly while humanity sticks its head in sand that is quickly shifting away. We have thus far been unable and unwilling to confront the stark realities of our environment. And like many civilizations before us, we may not survive it — not least because we have the technology to make it exponentially worse.
The good news is that much of the good news presented by Kolbert is still in place. Solutions like the 2000 Watt Society are still growing and their members and scientists are still finding solutions. There is an island in Denmark that has gone carbon neutral and wind and solar power are fast growing industries. I want everyone to read this book because I want us to acknowledge those stark realities, but also to see the bigger, more important picture that Kolbert presents. Things like changing patterns of butterfly migration and melting permafrost come together with our politics and policies to define the environment of the only planet most of us are ever going to get to live on. (Yes, I’m still holding out hope for some kind of warp speed interplanetary intervention).
Read this book, and then give it to someone you know who doubts, someone who isn’t sure that this is really a big a deal as everyone says it is. They will be lured in with Kolbert’s descriptions of glaciers and absent minded professors and butterflies so skillfully that by the time she diagnoses our politics with the calm, sober attentiveness of an oncologist, they’ll think they’ve believed in climate change the entire time, and they’ll be ready to pass the book off to someone else.

