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Turned out Nice: How the British Isles Will Change as the World Heats Up
This book is a precise and fiercely honest projection of what we know about climate change into the future of one small corner of the planet: the islands of Britain and Ireland. Kohn looks closely at six landscapes and one city to show how our world will have altered over the course of the century. These islands will, compared with the parched Mediterranean lands, let alone a devastated Africa, be fairly benign places to live. But we will have paid a terrible price for our relative good fortune. Our parks will be arid brown fields; private automobile use unheard of; water will be severely rationed; significant stretches of our beloved coastline will have been sacrificed to the sea. Some of our flora and fauna will have vanished; exotic animals and pests will flourish. Vast numbers of marginalised human migrants will be here. Surveillance and restriction of our movements will be taken for granted. Walking in what is left of nature' will be nearly impossible. Terrible summer fires in our upland areas will be commonplace. This is a report from the near future that we cannot afford to ignore.
- GenresNonfiction
368 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2011
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31 people want to read
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Marek Kohn
13 books16 followersMarek Kohn is a British science writer on evolution, biology and society.
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September 9, 2010Economist review sept 2
Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future. By Matthew Kahn. Basic Books; 288 pages; $26.95 and £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles Will Change as the World Heats Up. By Marek Kohn. Faber & Faber; 368 pages; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
CLIMATE change is a pretty scary topic, and those who write about it have, for the most part, been happy to play up the scariness. This may be due to noble motives or base ones. Many will have chosen to write about climate change because they think something should be done about it and that if their readers get scared they will be more likely to act. Others may intuit that their readers are likely to be seeking stuff that confirms how right they were to have perceived the dreadfulness of the world in ways lesser people have not. This is the road to “climate porn”, which revels in exaggerated disaster.
It is refreshing, then, to read books which look at the warming to come not as a frightful warning, nor as a fait accompli, but as something to which, at some levels of change, people will have to adapt—and which in some settings they may adapt to rather well. The setting Matthew Kahn is interested in is the city, one of his preoccupations as an economist; Marek Kohn’s is the British Isles.
Mr Kahn suggests that city-dwellers have various advantages in preparing for the changes to come. They live in surroundings which, historically, have favoured innovation, have proved resilient in the face of shocks and between which it is comparatively simple to move when things get too bad. Migration from city to city is easier, when it comes to finding a niche to fill at the far end of the journey, than from country to town.
The author has a good eye for the conflicts that can complicate his picture of rational people responding to risk. National and city governments have an interest in making their cities seem safe which pulls against the interest that city dwellers have in gauging the risks and acting accordingly. Los Angeles sends perverse signals about water use that will come back to haunt it; Manhattan (like Venice) has an interest in downplaying the risk of truly catastrophic floods. In Manhattan the issue is further complicated because the people whose taxes might pay for flood protection—mostly in rented accommodation—are not the owners of the property that will increase in value if floods are taken seriously.
The book tries to cover a lot of ground, but it remains (as climate-resilient cities will need to be) a bit pedestrian. It is overlarded with references to unhelpful popular culture and its take on some climate issues, as opposed to their economic consequences, is a tad superficial. Mr Kahn’s belief that “Moscow is unlikely to suffer from extreme heatwaves” does not engender much trust in his lists of cities that are climate-proof or climate-vulnerable (our picture shows a woman surviving Moscow this summer). To say that such a belief was fair enough at the time the book was written is to face the fact that the climate is a rather more complex and uncertain thing than the even, upbeat tenor of the book encourages readers to think.
For a far fuller sense of what climate change might mean to a specific city, turn to the chapter on London in Mr Kohn’s “Turned Out Nice”, a tour de force of information and speculation. Like Mr Kahn, Mr Kohn takes the position that attempts to limit climate change are important, but that some change is inevitable. Thanks to the moderating influence of the Atlantic ocean, he concludes that in Britain for the rest of this century this change will be less profound than elsewhere, having “nothing to compare with the kind of shocks that will hit Spain, half of which could become semi-desert, let alone Bengal”. But that does not mean it will be negligible. As climate change reinforces some trends and counteracts others it will reshape Britain and its landscapes.
Mr Kohn illustrates and elaborates this idea by studying a range of specific places in detail, among them Glen Affric in the Highlands, the meanders of the Cuckmere river as it reaches the Sussex coast and the industrial citadel of Sizewell, a nuclear power plant which looms above a famous nature reserve. Writers such as Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin have spent recent years bringing sustained and sympathetic observation, detailed research and a sometimes wilful eclecticism to their accounts of Britain’s landscapes. In his application of their techniques to the future, Mr Kohn gives a depth to the scenarios of which he speaks that the numbers and maps of more mundane climate prognostication can never match.
In the process of immersing the reader in a fully realised set of tomorrows, Mr Kohn also recasts his perception of today. Nature writing which takes the future and its possibilities as seriously as the past allows the reader to look at the present in a way that the declinist narratives so common in environmental writing disbar; the reader can see today as being in the middle of things, pulled in many directions, not pressed down at the end of time.
This unusual perspective should recommend the book to anyone interested in how the British relate to their land. It also encourages a pragmatic rebooting of those relations. The need to choose how to adapt to the future highlights the choices—about town planning, or forestry, or coastal defences, or immigration—that have shaped the present. It encourages the reader to think of the practicalities of what goes where, and why, of what should drain (city streets, through porous surfaces into the ground beneath) and what should soak (seaside levels, released from the hydrologic corsets of Victorian planners), of what should be wild and what be tamed.
Mr Kohn’s book is a richer, harder and more rewarding read than Mr Kahn’s. But both share a welcome desire to look at what climate change means in a world that can adapt to it—and what can hinder that adaptation. They look at the opportunities as well as the costs; they encourage as well as warn. And both remember that there will be some things that cannot be saved, even though others may not be lost.
Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future. By Matthew Kahn. Basic Books; 288 pages; $26.95 and £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles Will Change as the World Heats Up. By Marek Kohn. Faber & Faber; 368 pages; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
CLIMATE change is a pretty scary topic, and those who write about it have, for the most part, been happy to play up the scariness. This may be due to noble motives or base ones. Many will have chosen to write about climate change because they think something should be done about it and that if their readers get scared they will be more likely to act. Others may intuit that their readers are likely to be seeking stuff that confirms how right they were to have perceived the dreadfulness of the world in ways lesser people have not. This is the road to “climate porn”, which revels in exaggerated disaster.
It is refreshing, then, to read books which look at the warming to come not as a frightful warning, nor as a fait accompli, but as something to which, at some levels of change, people will have to adapt—and which in some settings they may adapt to rather well. The setting Matthew Kahn is interested in is the city, one of his preoccupations as an economist; Marek Kohn’s is the British Isles.
Mr Kahn suggests that city-dwellers have various advantages in preparing for the changes to come. They live in surroundings which, historically, have favoured innovation, have proved resilient in the face of shocks and between which it is comparatively simple to move when things get too bad. Migration from city to city is easier, when it comes to finding a niche to fill at the far end of the journey, than from country to town.
The author has a good eye for the conflicts that can complicate his picture of rational people responding to risk. National and city governments have an interest in making their cities seem safe which pulls against the interest that city dwellers have in gauging the risks and acting accordingly. Los Angeles sends perverse signals about water use that will come back to haunt it; Manhattan (like Venice) has an interest in downplaying the risk of truly catastrophic floods. In Manhattan the issue is further complicated because the people whose taxes might pay for flood protection—mostly in rented accommodation—are not the owners of the property that will increase in value if floods are taken seriously.
The book tries to cover a lot of ground, but it remains (as climate-resilient cities will need to be) a bit pedestrian. It is overlarded with references to unhelpful popular culture and its take on some climate issues, as opposed to their economic consequences, is a tad superficial. Mr Kahn’s belief that “Moscow is unlikely to suffer from extreme heatwaves” does not engender much trust in his lists of cities that are climate-proof or climate-vulnerable (our picture shows a woman surviving Moscow this summer). To say that such a belief was fair enough at the time the book was written is to face the fact that the climate is a rather more complex and uncertain thing than the even, upbeat tenor of the book encourages readers to think.
For a far fuller sense of what climate change might mean to a specific city, turn to the chapter on London in Mr Kohn’s “Turned Out Nice”, a tour de force of information and speculation. Like Mr Kahn, Mr Kohn takes the position that attempts to limit climate change are important, but that some change is inevitable. Thanks to the moderating influence of the Atlantic ocean, he concludes that in Britain for the rest of this century this change will be less profound than elsewhere, having “nothing to compare with the kind of shocks that will hit Spain, half of which could become semi-desert, let alone Bengal”. But that does not mean it will be negligible. As climate change reinforces some trends and counteracts others it will reshape Britain and its landscapes.
Mr Kohn illustrates and elaborates this idea by studying a range of specific places in detail, among them Glen Affric in the Highlands, the meanders of the Cuckmere river as it reaches the Sussex coast and the industrial citadel of Sizewell, a nuclear power plant which looms above a famous nature reserve. Writers such as Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin have spent recent years bringing sustained and sympathetic observation, detailed research and a sometimes wilful eclecticism to their accounts of Britain’s landscapes. In his application of their techniques to the future, Mr Kohn gives a depth to the scenarios of which he speaks that the numbers and maps of more mundane climate prognostication can never match.
In the process of immersing the reader in a fully realised set of tomorrows, Mr Kohn also recasts his perception of today. Nature writing which takes the future and its possibilities as seriously as the past allows the reader to look at the present in a way that the declinist narratives so common in environmental writing disbar; the reader can see today as being in the middle of things, pulled in many directions, not pressed down at the end of time.
This unusual perspective should recommend the book to anyone interested in how the British relate to their land. It also encourages a pragmatic rebooting of those relations. The need to choose how to adapt to the future highlights the choices—about town planning, or forestry, or coastal defences, or immigration—that have shaped the present. It encourages the reader to think of the practicalities of what goes where, and why, of what should drain (city streets, through porous surfaces into the ground beneath) and what should soak (seaside levels, released from the hydrologic corsets of Victorian planners), of what should be wild and what be tamed.
Mr Kohn’s book is a richer, harder and more rewarding read than Mr Kahn’s. But both share a welcome desire to look at what climate change means in a world that can adapt to it—and what can hinder that adaptation. They look at the opportunities as well as the costs; they encourage as well as warn. And both remember that there will be some things that cannot be saved, even though others may not be lost.
February 23, 2016
Whereas Italian people like to talk about food, or so I am told, English people have a tendency to talk a lot about the weather. They (we) also have this way of subtly understating things. Instead of saying truthfully that there's a force ten gale blowing outside, they will come into the house, with hair and umbrella blown inside out, and then quietly declare that it's a little breezy out!
Look at the title of this book. It illustrates these two English propensities quite well. Well - kinda. Okay - not at all. Well, I've written it now - it'd be such a waste not to use all those words.
I can just imagine the author of this book thinking the same thing after writing this book. It's just so chock full of descriptions of different places in the British Isles, and so stuffed with statistics about this aspect of climate and that feature of meteorology (gosh but that is a hard word to spell - but I got it right first time!) that it would have been such a shame not to publish it.
I'm sure it's all true, and that the UK will in fact be fine come one hundred years in the future, when the ice-caps have melted and southern Europe has been turned into a new Sahara. Sure, it'll be a bit warmer, but think of all the money we'll save by not jetting off to Spain to get a bit of sunshine. Imagine Mablethorpe, Scarborough and Skegness as constituting the new Coast of the Sun in the year 2110 and you won't be far off the mark.
Crops will grow faster and stronger because we have sunshine for longer and people will want to move here. This will make the UK economy one of the strongest around here and will make us all rich and happy.
That's what the title really means - it truly will turn out nice around here if the author's ability to predict the future is to be given credence.
I just wish this book could have said all that in a more engaging and, above all, concise way.
Too much detail man!
Look at the title of this book. It illustrates these two English propensities quite well. Well - kinda. Okay - not at all. Well, I've written it now - it'd be such a waste not to use all those words.
I can just imagine the author of this book thinking the same thing after writing this book. It's just so chock full of descriptions of different places in the British Isles, and so stuffed with statistics about this aspect of climate and that feature of meteorology (gosh but that is a hard word to spell - but I got it right first time!) that it would have been such a shame not to publish it.
I'm sure it's all true, and that the UK will in fact be fine come one hundred years in the future, when the ice-caps have melted and southern Europe has been turned into a new Sahara. Sure, it'll be a bit warmer, but think of all the money we'll save by not jetting off to Spain to get a bit of sunshine. Imagine Mablethorpe, Scarborough and Skegness as constituting the new Coast of the Sun in the year 2110 and you won't be far off the mark.
Crops will grow faster and stronger because we have sunshine for longer and people will want to move here. This will make the UK economy one of the strongest around here and will make us all rich and happy.
That's what the title really means - it truly will turn out nice around here if the author's ability to predict the future is to be given credence.
I just wish this book could have said all that in a more engaging and, above all, concise way.
Too much detail man!
March 9, 2014
My year of mediocre reads (save the Theroux) continues. A just-ok book about how global warming could affect the British Isles. Somehow the review made it sound interesting. It had its moments and it's also interesting to have a non-Brit perspective on what they consider normal and abnormal weather.
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August 7, 2012This book was a bit of a disappointment. Although it is clearly written and the science is presented in an informal manner this informality makes it seem almost like science fiction.I couldn't properly engage with it and was really speed reading the last third.
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March 31, 2018This is a banging premise for a book, he maps out what sort of thing will be going down in Britain in the future with the effects of climate change. The title is kind of tongue in cheek. It hammers home the point that although the UK and other developed countries have done a lot of the damage from climate change, Britain will do *relatively* well in the future. Spain, will be mostly desert, and the predictions for some places in Africa are pretty bleak. It’s still not gonna be great here, some of the projections in the book would put the part of London I live in under water.
That said, I didn’t get on that well with this book. There were a lot of interesting statistics, but I ended up putting it down around a third of the way through.
That said, I didn’t get on that well with this book. There were a lot of interesting statistics, but I ended up putting it down around a third of the way through.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews