Field Notes from a Catastrophe

“The most dramatic changes are occurring in those places, like Shishmaref, where the fewest people tend to live.”

In her award-winning work on climate change, Kolbert traces the impacts of global warming from pole to pole. Kolbert begins her journey in Greenland, where a small island is already being submerged underwater. She will return to the theme in Chapter 6 on the Netherlands’ experiments with floating houses. Though climate change is a well-known phenomenon, Kolbert sets up her exposé by asserting that the implications of rising temperatures remain in public awareness an “unknown known,” to use Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase. 

“[…] between the 1960s and the 1990s, sea ice depth in a large section of the Arctic Ocean declined by nearly forty percent.” 

Detractors of climate change action often claim that evidence of global warming is somehow deceptive or not representative of the whole picture. Indeed, Kolbert assents that even among scientists there is a lack of consensus on climate change. However, she shows in this book that there is scientific consensus that climate change is both real and rapid. Statistics such as this one suggest that the problem humans have with tackling climate change is not a lack of knowledge, ingenuity, nor simply economically motivated, but an affective inability to accept responsibility for our collective environmental impact.