Tim Flannery Says...

Still reading global warming books. We have received a couple of new ones since the last time we posted. James Lovelock's The revenge of Gaia : earth's climate in crisis and the fate of humanity will really startle you. Lovelock thinks it's all over for civilization. Read what a reviewer at Real Climate thinks about Lovelock's vision. We have also received Kicking the carbon habit : global warming and the case for renewable and nuclear energy ; and the book version of the Gore film, An inconvenient truth : the planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it. You too can be talking to your friends in sentences that begin with phrases like, "Tim Flannery says..."; "Elizabeth Kolbert says..."

You can keep an eye on incoming materials on this topic by running the catalog search 'global warming' or 'renewable energy' or 'climate change' or 'climate and civilization', sorted in reverse date order and then saving it to your Preferred Searches, and running it now and again. Or, of course, construct your own search on this or any other topic. (You need to be logged in to your library record to save a Preferred Search.)

There's plenty to read on the topic no matter where you look, from news articles about California's carbon-emission legislation, to stories about creeping dead zones in the ocean, technical papers concluding the "likelihood of acceleration of ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise", or innumberable more discursive pieces like Bill McKibben's Worried? Us? essay in Granta, or his article a couple of weeks ago in the Boston Globe. Or books only implicitly relevant, like Douglas Erwin's surprisingly readable Extinction : how life on earth nearly ended 250 million years ago.