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‘With High Tide, Mark Lynas has given us a tremendous gift: he has time-travelled into our terrifying collective future, a future that has already arrived in the farthest reaches of the globe. Go with him on this breathtaking, beautifully told journey – to island nations being engulfed by rising tides, to towns swallowed by encroaching desert, to glaciers melting into oceans – and I promise that you will come back changed, determined to alter the course of history.’
Naomi Klein, author of No Logo
‘Clear, lucid and informative.’ New Statesman
‘A thoroughly engaging and well-researched book.’ TLS
‘If you are among those who think climate change is an uncertain, remote issue over which scientists are unsure, politicians talk endlessly to little effect, and mere individuals have no power at all, this book may be for you … Lynas tells us to keep repeating the climate change message. Read his book, and that is exactly what you will do.’ Guardian
‘There will be many more books like High Tide, but this will be remembered as the first … it’ll be the one with the original vision … Not unworthy of comparison with Orwell and certainly the breaker of new ground.’ Independent
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While the scientists debate the temperature rise rate or the intensity of this or that storm, around the planet people are living through the conditions of warming climate. Tuvalu residents, on their miniscule island chain in mid-Pacific, are watching the land wash away. It isn't just that melting ice caps are raising sea levels and ruining crops. There are more frequent and more devastating storms occuring. In China, land is also moving, but the reason is the opposite - the rains have ceased and the land is dried and blowing away in fierce desert winds. The account of a lone woman, the last survivor of a village overwhelmed by drought, is more poignant [to me] than anything found in fiction. And the number of such stories is growing.
If a most gripping part of this book must be chosen, it is Lynas' tour of Peru and the Cordillera Blanca glaciers. His father, a geologist, had visited the area three decades before, camera in hand. Huge glaciers, akin to frozen waterfalls, fill the images. With those photos in his knapsack, Lynas trudges up the slopes, racked by Alititude Sickness, to record any changes. His expression at the sight cannot be repeated here, a signal of his shock - and ours at his comparative photographs. The glaciers are gone! Lynas takes us through a litany of rivers of ice that are withdrawing from long established limits. The withdrawal has a dual results - not enough snow is feeding their growth, and the meltwater is no longer available to nourish human populations. He asks: what will the citizens of Lima do when there is no more water to drink? Lynas avoids prediction of furture El Ninos' impact on these conditions. He's hardly blameable for that. Some observations on North America's depletion of the Ogalalla Aquifer, only partly attributable to overuse of fossil fuels, however, would have been useful.
It is fossil fuel consumption that stands charged, indeed declared guilty by Lynas, as the culprit in these events. The tumultuous clouds of auto exhausts are the major source of gases rising into our atmosphere, choking off proper heat exchange mechanisms. The contributions of the oil industry to politicians short circuits any political action to curb these emmissions. Hence, Tuvalu is being swept away, China is choking with dust and Lima, Peru will soon be seeking homes for its million citizens. But the United States, the world's greatest and most persistent polluter, decrys or subverts all efforts to quell the output of their millions of vehicles, while assiduously searching for more to burn.
Lynas is unequivical in his denunciations. At the same time, he invokes response from his readers to take action. Pollution increases can be curbed, he argues in his conclusion. It is you who must take the first steps. America, he stresses, must follow the lead of the European Union. Ratification of the Kyoto Protocol is the first step - a committment to stop, then reduce emissions. "Contraction and convergence" policies must be implemented as a means of reducing emissions with a minimal impact on economies. The quest for new supplies of fossil fuels must cease and the funds used to promote alternative energy sources. Individual actions, amazingly easy small steps, must be taken and imparting to others the need follow your example spreads the message. "Don't be scared to speak out!", he warns. Who should read his warning message? Anyone who breathes - and wishes to continue breathing. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
When you have finished Mark Lynas and you understand a bit about climatechange and why it needs to be addressed, read Status Anxiety by Alain deBotton - you might just re think what you NEED and WANT.
However books like these also need some hard science and here there are too many weaknesses. For example early on he speculates that trees may not be able to breach the urban barrier of the Northern Metropolitan areas as they are forced to migrate North in a warmer UK. A bizarre howler that reveals his misunderstanding of urban geography (Greater Manchester is not a contiguous concrete bloc), plant dispersal (surprisingly resilient) and agricultural land management (a huge number of trees have been specifially planted by landowners for many years).
More significantly he fails to consider that geological factors can ensure that islands can sink into the sea without any overall global rise in sea levels; that glaciers have been in retreat in tropical areas for over a century and even during periods when it has been generally getting colder (deforestration following local population increases are most probably to blame) and that dust storms in central Asia largely reflect bad land management (particularly but not only under centralised state farming regimes).
In short it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the author is looking for evidence of something he has decided already exists rather than generating a case from first principles. As a result the book has made me far more sceptical about global warming as a theory. Almost certainly this wasn't the author's intention but it is to his credit that he has presented his research sufficiently to allow me to draw this conclusion.
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