UW News

October 11, 2007

‘Common Book’ author Kolbert warns of coming catastrophe brought by global warming

Elizabeth Kolbert tells scary stories, the kind that stick in your head long after you’ve finished her book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.

She will visit the UW Seattle campus on Oct. 17, as Field Notes is this year’s Common Book choice. The Common Book program includes copies of Kolbert’s work distributed to more than 5,000 new UW students. It’s intended, via a yearlong series of formal and informal discussions, to help shape the undergraduate experience.

Kolbert’s visit includes meetings with students during the day and a panel discussion in the Hec Edmundson Pavilion at 7 p.m. There will be a resource fair in the pavilion at 6 p.m. About a dozen UW and community groups will offer information on environmental resources in the Seattle area.

Kolbert’s book grew out of “The Climate of Man,” a three-part series in The New Yorker magazine during the spring of 2005. The series won wide acclaim: the National Magazine Award, the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award and an award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006, The New York Times Book Review chose Field Notes from a Catastrophe as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year.

Kolbert reports on places where the effects of global warming have been dramatic: Fairbanks, Alaska, for example, where significant parts of the permafrost have thawed “like a rotting floorboard.”

She puts faces on the stories, too. People like Vladimir Romanovsky, a Russian geophysicist and permafrost expert who lives in Fairbanks and took Kolbert on a tour of thermokarsts (holes in the permafrost), including one near his house about 6 feet wide and 5 feet deep. The thawing matters because permafrost has been, in effect, a repository for greenhouse gases.

In a telephone interview earlier this month, Kolbert spoke quietly but passionately about global warming: “My message to students is get involved,” she said. “Don’t wait for someone else to solve this because your elders have kind of failed you. You need to force some action.”

The biggest and most horrifying part of global warming at the moment, Kolbert said, is the melting of the Arctic ice cap. At the end of this past summer, the amount of ice was the lowest ever reported. “Quite probably,” she said, “the lowest in many, many many, many thousands of years.”

It means Earth will absorb more heat, causing temperatures to rise and more ice to melt. That, in turn, can lead to drought, stronger storms, pest outbreaks, extinction of climate-sensitive animals and rising sea levels.

At the rate ice is melting, people told Kolbert, the Arctic cap, the sea ice, is “doomed.”

In the next edition of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Kolbert may add a piece about carbon dioxide emissions into the oceans. It’s a huge but not sufficiently understood problem. About one-third to one-half of CO2 emissions go into the oceans, changing their acidity. That’s bad for a multitude of reasons, including the difficulty acidic water poses for creatures who form shells.

So, are there any knowledgeable people who don’t believe in global warming? “I’m not sure you can count them on one hand anymore — maybe a couple of fingers,” Kolbert said. “Many people were waiting for the data to come in, and now it has.”

Asked what can be done — particularly among educational institutions and the people who populate them — Kolbert mentioned inefficient buildings, that 20 to 30 percent of the typical energy budget could be saved by upgrading heating, cooling and lighting systems.

Individuals, she said, could consider how often they unnecessarily drive around campus, and whether in dorms, doors and windows are opened when the heat’s on; whether mini-refrigerators are necessary. “Little refrigerators are very inefficient,” Kolbert said.

So, how serious are people about addressing global warming? Europeans are far ahead of Americans, Kolbert said, but whether Americans will get more serious remains to be seen.

“The optimistic part of me says yes, we will, but the realist says we have a long way to go. For example, Americans still complain about $3 gas. Three dollars is way too cheap, and if we’re serious about climate change, we’re going to have to face up to this and a lot of other inconvenient facts.”

Kolbert’s talk is free, but registration requested; go to the Common Book Web site: http://www.washington.edu/uaa/commonbook/.