Hot : Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

A fresh take on climate change by a renowned journalist driven to protect his daughter, your kids, and the next generation who’ll inherit the problem For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard has investigated global warming for outlets including the__New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair,__ and __The Nation.__ But the full truth did not hit home until he became a father and, soon thereafter, learned that climate change had already arrived―a century earlier than forecast―with impacts bound to worsen for decades to come. Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara, now five yea rs old, is part of what he has dubbed ''Generation Hot''--the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption.__HOT__ is a father's cry against climate change, but most of the book focuses on s olutions, offering a deeply reported blueprint for how all of us―as parents, communities, companies and countries―can navigate this unavoidable new era. Combining reporting from across the nation and around the world with personal reflections on his daugh ter’s future, Hertsgaard provides ''pictures'' of what is expected over the next fifty years: Chicago’s climate transformed to resemble Houston’s; dwindling water supplies and crop yields at home and abroad; the redesign of New York and other cities against mega-storms and sea-level rise. Above all, he shows who is taking wise, creative precautions. For in the end, __HOT__ is a book about how we’ll survive

Prologue

Growing Up Under Global Warming

Working on climate change used to be about saving the world for future generations. Not anymore. Now it's not only your daughter who is at risk, it's probably you as well.

—MARTIN PARRY, co-chair of the Fourth Assessment Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

I covered the environmental beat for fifteen years before I became a father. Much of that time was spent overseas, where, like many other journalists, I saw more than my share of heartbreaking things happening to children. But they were always other people's children.

My first time was in the old Soviet Union, where I exposed a series of nuclear disasters that had been kept secret for decades by both the KGB and the CIA. One day, I visited the leukemia ward of the local children's hospital, where a dozen mothers and children had gathered to speak with me. Many of the kids were bald, thanks to the chemotherapy that was now being applied in a last-gasp attempt to save their stricken bodies. The mother of one heavyset girl could not stop sobbing. When her daughter stroked her arm to comfort her, the mother unleashed a deep, aching wail and fled the room. This woman, like the other mothers, knew what the children did not: the doctors expected 75 percent of these children to be dead within five years.

Soon after, I spent four months in the northeastern Horn of Africa, mainly covering drought and civil war. It was there, in a refugee camp in southern Sudan in 1992, that I first came face-to-face with starving children. In my mind's eye, I can still see the young mother as she entered the Red Cross compound, hoping to see a nurse. Unfolding the tattered cloth she had slung from her neck, the mother revealed a nine-month-old baby girl, a tiny creature with a grotesquely large skull and legs no thicker than my fingers. Like one of every eleven African children, this poor child would not live to see her first birthday.

Later still I visited China, where millions of children were breathing and drinking some of the most carcinogenic air and water on the planet. Crisscrossing the country in 1996 and 1997, I became the first writer to describe China's emergence as a climate change superpower, second only to the United States. To fuel its explosive economic growth and lift its people out of poverty, China was burning more coal than any other nation on earth, making its skies toxic and dark even on sunny after noons. Some of the worst health effects were being measured in the northern industrial city of Shenyang. One afternoon I visited a heavy-machinery factory that ranked among the city's deadliest polluters. I arrived just in time to see the street fill with hundreds of children. Chattering and laughing, they walked in rows six abreast, returning home from school, inhaling poison with every breath.

In my journalism, I tried to draw the outside world's attention to the plight of all of these children, as well as to its causes and potential remedies. Emotionally, though, I could keep a distance. This was partly because, as I say, these were other people's children. But it was also, I now see, because I was not yet a parent myself. I did not really understand, viscerally, how it feels to see one's own child be sick, in danger, and perhaps facing death.

I found out soon enough.

My daughter was born in 2005, in San Francisco, at the end of a long and difficult labor. After many hours and much pushing and tugging, she finally emerged from her mother's body. By that time, the urgency of the situation had drawn a dozen nurses into the room. As they attended to their various tasks—lifting the baby onto her mother's chest, administering her first bath—one nurse after another made the same observation.

"Wow, look how alert this baby is," the nurse in charge commented.

"I know," marveled a colleague. "Look at her eyes!"

Apparently, most newborns keep their eyes shut against the light of the new world. Not ours. Her blazing blue eyes were wide open. From the moment she got here, this little girl was awake on the planet.

When it came time to give her a name, her mother and I remembered these first moments of her life and decided to call her Chiara. In the Italian language of her ancestors, Chiara (pronounced with a hard C, Key-AR-a) means "clear and bright."

Everything seemed fine until two days later. We had taken Chiara home from the hospital. As scheduled, a nurse came to conduct a follow-up exam. A few hours later, a doctor called and told us to bring Chiara back to the hospital, to the intensive care unit, right away. The exam had found dangerous levels of bilirubin in her blood. Brain damage or worse could follow.

At the intensive care unit, Chiara was placed inside an incubator, a white gauze headband stretched around her little skull to protect her eyes. The nurses jokingly called it a raccoon mask. Day and night I sat beside the incubator, watching Chiara's yellowish body get drenched with vitamin D–laden light.

Yet as worried as I was, I also felt fortunate. Unlike the children I recalled in Russia, Africa, and China, Chiara had access to excellent medical care. Within three days, she had completely recovered, with no lasting damage, and was sent back home.

Six months later, though, a different threat arose to my daughter's life, and this time no quick fix was available. During a reporting trip to London in October 2005, I learned that the global warming problem had undergone a momentous transformation. Humanity, it turned out, was in a very different fight than most people realized. Now, no matter what we did, Chiara and her generation were fated to inherit—indeed, spend most of their lives coping with—a climate that would be hotter than ever before in our civilization's history.

Global Warming Triggers Climate Change

The most important interview I did in London was with Sir David King, the chief science adviser to the British government. King received me at his office high above Victoria Street, a few blocks west of Parliament. When he stood up to shake hands, I could glimpse the spires of Westminster Abbey over his shoulder. Though not a tall man, King projected an unmistakable air of command as he invited me to join him at a conference table. I was on assignment from Vanity Fair magazine, a fact that seemed to amuse King, who had chaired the chemistry department at Cambridge University for seven years before entering government. "That's one publication I never thought I'd appear in," he said, chuckling. "I guess climate change has finally made the mainstream in the United States."

Since becoming science adviser in 2000, David King had done as much to raise awareness of climate change as anyone except former U.S. vice president Al Gore. Among other accomplishments, King had reportedly persuaded Prime Minister Tony Blair to make the issue a priority, and Blair in turn made climate change the lead topic at the 2005 summit of the Group of Eight, the world's richest economies. King also had a gift for attracting media coverage. In 2004, he called climate change "the most severe problem we are facing today—more serious even than the threat of terrorism." Coming barely two years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the comment enraged right-wingers in Washington. But King told me he "absolutely" stood by it. "I think this is a massive test for our civilization," he said. "Our civilization has developed over the past eight thousand years during a period which has had remarkably constant weather conditions and remarkably constant ocean levels. What is happening now, through our use of fossil fuels, through our growing population, is that that stable period is under severe threat."

I had begun following the climate issue in 1989, the year I first interviewed James Hansen. As the chief climate scientist at the space agency NASA, Hansen had put climate change on the international agenda the year before when, in testimony to the U.S. Senate, he declared that man-made global warming had begun. Of course, natural global warming had been taking place for a very long time already. Building on the work of scientists going back to Joseph Fourier in 1824, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Svante Arrhenius had published a theory of the greenhouse effect in 1896. The theory held that carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere trap heat from the sun that otherwise would escape back into space, thus raising temperatures on earth. Indeed, without the greenhouse effect, Earth would be too cold to support human life. In his Senate testimony, Hansen argued that human activities—notably, the burning of oil, coal, and other carbon-based fuels—had now added excessive amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This extra CO2 was raising global temperatures, and they would rise significantly higher if emissions were not reduced. The higher temperatures in turn could trigger dangerous climate change, Hansen added.

A quick word here on definitions: although the terms global warming and climate change are often used interchangeably, a critical difference exists between them. In this book, global warming refers to the man-made rise in temperatures caused by excessive amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate change, on the other hand, refers to the effects these higher temperatures have on the earth's natural systems and the impacts that can result: stronger storms, deeper droughts, shifting seasons, sea level rise, and much else. To oversimplify slightly, think of global warming as the equivalent of a fever and climate change as the aches, chills, and vomiting the fever can cause.

It was partly Hansen's 1988 Senate testimony that led me to spend most of the 1990s traveling around the world, researching humanity's environmental future. I was also motivated by interviews I had done with Jimmy Carter, the former U.S. president; Jacques Cousteau, the French underwater explorer; Lester Brown, the founder of the Worldwatch Institute; and other leading environmental thinkers. Brown in particular had argued that problems such as global warming and population growth were cumulative in nature and thus presented a new kind of environmental challenge: if they were not reversed within the next ten years, Brown said, they could acquire too much momentum to reverse at all. I wasn't necessarily convinced Brown was correct, but his assertion was a provocative hypothesis to explore as I set off around the world. My mission was to investigate whether our civilization's survival was indeed threatened by global warming, population growth, and related environmental hazards. And if the danger was real, I hoped to gauge whether human societies would act quickly and decisively enough to avoid environmental self-destruction.

Over the course of six years, I investigated conditions at ground level in sixteen countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America to write the book Earth Odyssey. As part of my research, in 1992 I covered the UN "Earth Summit" in Brazil, where I watched the heads of state or government for most of the world's nations (including the United States, under the first President Bush) affix their signatures to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This treaty remains in force today; the better-known Kyoto Protocol is an amendment to it. The treaty's key sentence affirmed the world's governments' pledge to keep atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases low enough to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic [man-made] interference with the climate system."

From the start, then, the goal of the international community was to stop global warming before it triggered dangerous climate change. As the 1990s wore on, more and more scientists came to agree with Hansen that average global temperatures were rising and that humanity's greenhouse gas emissions were the main reason why. But—and this is the key point—most scientists did not expect this global warming to trigger significant climate change for a long time to come: the year 2100 was the date usually referenced in scientists' studies of sea level rise, famine, and other possible impacts. Although 2100 was chosen partly because it was distant enough to enable more reliable computer modeling studies, the date had the practical effect of implying—especially to politicians, journalists, ordinary citizens, and non-scientists in general—that serious impacts were a century away. In short, climate change was regarded as a grave but remote future threat, and one that could still be averted if humanity reduced emissions in time.

Meanwhile, a tiny but well-funded minority had begun arguing that global warming was little more than a politically inspired hoax. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, was the highest-ranking scientist making this claim, but most of the argument was carried by spokespersons for the Global Climate Coalition, a pressure group created and funded by U.S.-based energy and auto companies. Notwithstanding its studiously neutral name, the coalition would spend millions of dollars in the 1990s on a public disinformation campaign whose strategy and tactics recalled the tobacco industry's earlier efforts to persuade people that smoking cigarettes does not cause cancer. Indeed, Seitz and organizations he directed were paid more than $45 million for their work, first by tobacco and later by energy companies, as I'll describe later in this book.

The goal of the disinformation campaign was to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," according to an internal strategy memo unearthed by journalist Ross Gelbspan, who exposed the campaign in his 1997 book The Heat Is On. Despite such revelations, the deniers had considerable influence over the public debate, at least in the United States. Fortified by corporate contributions and bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress, deniers turned global warming into a political rather than a scientific dispute, blaming a supposed conspiracy by Gore and other "liberals" to advance a radical environmental agenda. James Inhofe, a Republican senator from the oil-rich state of Oklahoma, led the charge, calling global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." But Inhofe, Seitz, and other deniers could never have fooled the public and stalled political progress without the help of the mainstream media. In the name of providing journalistic balance, U.S. news stories routinely gave as much prominence to deniers of man-made global warming as they did to affirmers of it, even though the deniers amounted to a tiny fraction of the scientific community and often, as in Seitz's case, were in the pay of fossil fuel companies.

The upshot was that public discussion of global warming from the 1990s onward was framed as an if-then formulation: if global warming is real, and if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, then humanity might face problems in the far-off future.

In our London interview, David King shattered this framing. Climate change, the science adviser told me, was no longer a distant hypothetical threat: it had already begun. What's more, climate change was guaranteed to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it got better.

No comparably prominent scientist in the United States was saying this sort of thing publicly in 2005. In particular, King's assertions went beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international group of scientists and experts the UN had created in 1988 to advise the world's governments on global warming. The IPCC had issued three major reports on climate change by the time I interviewed King. Its First Assessment Report appeared in 1990, its Second Assessment Report in 1995, and its Third Assessment Report in 2001. Only in its Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, eighteen months after our interview, did the IPCC declare that the scientific evidence for man-made global warming was "unequivocal" and that long-term sea level rise and other impacts of climate change had become inevitable. If King was ahead of the curve, it was partly because, as the British government's chief science adviser, he kept a close eye on what his country's scientists were doing. Indeed, he told me, a group of British scientists had recently detected the so-called climate signal; that is, the scientists had demonstrated that global warming had already exerted an impact on the earth's climate that stood out from the statistical noise of the historical record.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from HOT by MARK HERTSGAARD Copyright © 2011 by Mark Hertsgaard. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard investigated climate change, but it took the birth of his daughter to bring the truth home. Another revelation came when an expert advised that, without doubt, global warming had arrived, more than a hundred years earlier than expected.

 

Now, with his daughter and the next generation in mind, Hertsgaard delivers a resounding, motivating message of hope that will spur activism among parents, college students, and all readers. He gives specifics about what we can expect in the next fifty years: Chicago’s climate transformed to resemble Houston’s; the loss of cherished crops and luxuries, such as California wines; the redesign of U.S. cities. Addressing problems we’ll face very soon and revealing where they’ll be most serious, Hertsgaard offers “pictures” of what unbiased experts expect, and looks at who is taking wise, creative precautions. Hot is, finally, a book about how we’ll survive.

Publishers Weekly

A new father, Hertsgaard (Earth Odyssey) was growing increasingly anxious and despondent about climate change and the world his child would inherit. His new book is his investigation into the techniques that could allow his daughter and her generation to survive the challenges ahead. This readable, passionate book is surprisingly optimistic: Seattle, Chicago, and New York are making long-term, comprehensive plans for flooding and drought. Impoverished farmers in the already drought-stricken African Sahel have discovered how to substantially improve yields and decrease malnutrition by growing trees among their crops, and the technique has spread across the region; Bangladeshis, some of the poorest and most flood-vulnerable yet resilient people on earth, are developing imaginative innovations such as weaving floating gardens from water hyacinth that lift with rising water. Contrasting the Netherland's 200-year flood plans to the New Orleans Katrina disaster, Hertsgaard points out that social structures, even more than technology, will determine success, and persuasively argues that human survival depends on bottom-up, citizen-driven government action. (Jan.)

An “informative and vividly reported book” that goes beyond the politics of climate change to explore practical ways we can adapt and survive (San Francisco Chronicle). Journalist Mark Hertsgaard has reported on global warming for outlets including the New Yorker, NPR, Time, and Vanity Fair. But it was only after he became a father that he started thinking about the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption. In Hot, he presents a well-researched blueprint for how all of us―parents, communities, companies, and countries―can navigate this unavoidable new era. Reporting from across the nation and around the world, Hertsgaard provides examples of ambitious attempts to mitigate the effects of sea-level rise, mega-storms, famine, and other threats—and an “urgent message... that citizens and governments cannot afford to ignore” (The Boston Globe). “This readable, passionate book is surprisingly optimistic: Seattle, Chicago, and New York are making long-term, comprehensive plans for flooding and drought. Impoverished farmers in the already drought-stricken African Sahel have discovered how to substantially improve yields and decrease malnutrition by growing trees among their crops, and the technique has spread across the region; Bangladeshis, some of the poorest and most flood-vulnerable yet resilient people on earth, are developing imaginative innovations such as weaving floating gardens from water hyacinth that lift with rising water. Contrasting the Netherlands'200-year flood plans to the New Orleans Katrina disaster, Hertsgaard points out that social structures, even more than technology, will determine success, and persuasively argues that human survival depends on bottom-up, citizen-driven government action.” —Publishers Weekly “His analysis of the impact of global warming on industries as different as winemaking and insurance is intriguing, and his well-supported conclusion that social change can beat back climate change is inspiring... an exceptionally productive approach to a confounding reality.” —Booklist “This is an important book.” —Bill McKibben A fresh take on climate change by a renowned journalist driven to protect his daughter, your kids, and the next generation who’ll inherit the problem For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard has investigated global warming for outlets including the?New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and The Nation. But the full truth did not hit home until he became a father and, soon thereafter, learned that climate change had already arrived?a century earlier than forecast?with impacts bound to worsen for decades to come. Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara, now five yea rs old, is part of what he has dubbed "Generation Hot"--the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption. HOT is a father's cry against climate change, but most of the book focuses on s olutions, offering a deeply reported blueprint for how all of us?as parents, communities, companies and countries?can navigate this unavoidable new era. Combining reporting from across the nation and around the world with personal reflections on his daugh ter’s future, Hertsgaard provides "pictures" of what is expected over the next fifty years: Chicago’s climate transformed to resemble Houston’s; dwindling water supplies and crop yields at home and abroad; the redesign of New York and other cities against mega-storms and sea-level rise. Above all, he shows who is taking wise, creative precautions. For in the end, HOT is a book about how we’ll survive. A fresh take on climate change by a renowned journalist driven to protect his daughter, your kids, and the next generation wholl inherit the problem. For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard has investigated global warming for outlets including the New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and The Nation . But the full truth did not hit home until he became a father and, soon thereafter, learned that climate change had already arriveda century earlier than forecastwith impacts bound to worsen for decades to come. Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara, now five years old, is part of what he has dubbed "Generation Hot" -- the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption. HOT is a father's cry against climate change, but most of the book focuses on solutions, offering a deeply reported blueprint for how all of usas parents, communities, companies and countriescan navigate this unavoidable new era. Combining reporting from across the nation and around the world with personal reflections on his daughters future, Hertsgaard provides "pictures" of what is expected over the next fifty years: Chicagos climate transformed to resemble Houstons; dwindling water supplies and crop yields at home and abroad; the redesign of New York and other cities against mega-storms and sea-level rise. Above all, he shows who is taking wise, creative precautions. For in the end, HOT is a book about how well survive.

"Hot bravely takes aim at perhaps the greatest climate threat of all: apathy." — Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation

"Hertsgaard’s answers . . . are lucid, realistic, and offer reason for hope." — Christian Science Monitor

For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard has investigated global warming as a journalist, but the full truth did not hit home until he became a father and, soon thereafter, learned that climate change was bound to worsen for decades to come. Hertsgaard's daughter is part of what he has dubbed "Generation Hot" — the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with climate disruption. Drawing on reporting from around the world, Hot is a call to action that injects hope and solutions into a debate characterized by doom and gloom and offers a blueprint for how all of us ? parents, communities, countries ? can navigate an unavoidable new era.

"[Hot’s] urgent message is one that citizens and governments cannot afford to ignore." — Boston Globe

For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard investigated climate change, but it took the birth of his daughter to bring the truth home. Another revelation came when an expert advised that, without doubt, global warming had arrived, more than a hundred years earlier than expected. Now, with his daughter and the next generation in mind, Hertsgaard delivers a resounding, motivating message of hope that will spur activism among parents, college students, and all readers. He gives specifics about what we can expect in the next fifty years: Chicago's climate transformed to resemble Houston's; the loss of cherished crops and luxuries, such as California wines; the redesign of U.S. cities. Addressing problems we'll face very soon and revealing where they'll be most serious, Hertsgaard offers "pictures" of what unbiased experts expect, and looks at who is taking wise, creative precautions. Hot is, finally, a book about how we'll survive.--Publisher description