Confessing Evangelical

My latest Amazon haul arrived yesterday, including Jaroslav Pelikan's Whose Bible Is It?, and (winning the award for title-of-the-decade) Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

Field Notes has been compared by many people to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, whose warnings about the impact of pesticides and other chemicals is widely credited with having kick-started the modern environmental movement. In it, Kolbert sets out to describe evidence for climate change from around the world - the rapid melting of sea-ice and permafrost in the Arctic, the rapid northward movement of butterfly species in Britain, the extinction of a recently-discovered species of "extraordinary new toad" in Costa Rica.

As she writes (specifically in relation to species migration, but the point applies equally well to the other areas of evidence):

Any one of these changes could, potentially, be a response to purely local conditions ... The only explanation that anyone has proposed that makes sense of them all, though, is global warming.

I've read the first part of the book, "Nature", and so far it is persuasive, beautifully written - and dismaying in its relentless, fact-driven description of rapid climate change happening right now. As the quote from Robert F Kennedy Jr says on the back:

Kolbert mesmerizes with her poetic cadence as she closes the coffin on the arguments of the global warming skeptics.

My attention was first drawn to this book by a review in the May 2006 issue of Scientific American. The reviewer, Marguerite Holloway, is one of a number to make the Silent Spring comparison, and describes Field Notes as "powerful, clear and important". She also commends the book's "scientific authority":

Kolbert is not a scientist, but she reports regularly on science, and she may well have talked to every researcher on the planet studying global warming. There are names and characters in Field Notes that even a climate-change obsessive may not have seen in other press articles or books.

Holloway also bemoans the lack of protest on environmental (and other) issues in the US:

It is strangely quiet here. Americans are also burned out on environmental catastrophism ... The problems grow, but apathy has set in.

But Holloway ends her review with the hope that Kolbert's book might prove to be "this era's galvanizing text".

However, the paragraph from Holloway's review that made me determined to pick up Kolbert's book is the following:

It can get dizzying at times. Yet the enduring impression is of deep, sober, rooted authority - the same impression Silent Spring conveys. The book is a review of the scientific evidence and of the failure of the politicians we chose. The details are terrifying, and Kolbert's point of view is very clear, but there is no rhetoric of rant here. She is most directly editorial in the last sentence of the book, and by that point, she has built the case.

Climate change is an issue that has suffered from an excess of "rhetoric of rant" on both sides of the debate, but - as Al Gore's film has also shown - it is one in which the most effective approach is that taken by Kolbert in Field Notes: a calm, remorseless litany of facts, presented with a "deep, sober, rooted authority", building up what Owen Gingerich has called the "coherent patterns of explanation" (as distinct from "proof") that science is concerned with.

Kolbert's book is short, well-written, less hyped than the Al Gore movie, and I strongly recommend it. For those of you who are as shallow as me, I should also point out that the UK hardback edition is a physically gorgeous object.