Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

by Mark Hertsgaard

A fresh take on climate change by a renowned journalist driven to protect his daughter, your kids, and the next generation who’ll inherit the problem. For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard has investigated global warming for outlets including theNew Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and The Nation. But the full truth did not hit home until he became a father and, soon thereafter, learned that climate change had already arrived―a century earlier than forecast―with impacts bound to worsen for decades to come. Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara, now five years old, is part of what he has dubbed "Generation Hot" -- the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption.
HOT is a father's cry against climate change, but most of the book focuses on solutions, offering a deeply reported blueprint for how all of us―as parents, communities, companies and countries―can navigate this unavoidable new era. Combining reporting from across the nation and around the world with personal reflections on his daughter’s future, Hertsgaard provides "pictures" of what is expected over the next fifty years: Chicago’s climate transformed to resemble Houston’s; dwindling water supplies and crop yields at home and abroad; the redesign of New York and other cities against mega-storms and sea-level rise. Above all, he shows who is taking wise, creative precautions. For in the end, HOT is a book about how we’ll survive.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Environment, Climate Change, Politics, Nature, Green

339 pages, Hardcover

First published December 28, 2010

About the author

Mark Hertsgaard is an American journalist and the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now. He is the environment correspondent for The Nation, and the author of seven non-fiction books, including Earth Odyssey (1998) and Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (2011).
He has covered climate change, politics, economics, the press, and music since 1989. His best-known work as an author is On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (1988), which described the way the Reagan White House "deployed raw power and conventional wisdom to intimidate Washington's television newsrooms." He has also written for magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Scientific American,Time, Harper's, and Le Monde. He has been a commentator for the public radio programs Morning Edition, Marketplace, and Living on Earth, and taught writing at Johns Hopkins and the University of California, Berkeley. Hertsgaard lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update, post hurricane Sandy, autumn 2012:

Mark Hertsgaard wrote an essay for The Nation : Hurricane Sandy as Greek Tragedy which provides yet more evidence of our world's slow-motion train wreck. The name of the hurricane provides the most poignant and realistic note:

Sandy is short for Cassandra, the Greek mythological figure who epitomizes tragedy. The gods gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy; depending on which version of the story one prefers, she could either see or smell the future. But with this gift also came a curse: Cassandra’s warnings about future disasters were fated to be ignored. That is the essence of this tragedy: to know that a given course of action will lead to disaster but to pursue it nevertheless.

Hertsgaard states that “There are signs of hope” — but his threshold must be abysmally low. Does he really believe that “Especially in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there is no reason to continue disregarding scientists’ warnings about where our current path leads”? Of course, there are plenty of reasons, and he knows what they are. There is plenty of money behind the push to deny this, and huge portions of the American demos have passively chosen to believe there is a controversy, either because the issue is tied strongly to their other ideological positions, or because it is more convenient to be too busy to worry about such long-term problems.

Hertsgaard again has the wrong attitude and the wrong tone of voice. This message might be a bit more persuasive if it were delivered in tones of a thundering Mosaic condemnation from Mount Sinai. Because he leavens his message with unwarranted optimism, his message and the tragedy are both left easy to ignore.

Back to my original review —

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Mark Hertsgaard’s book covers a lot of ground, and I’d argue that in the coming years there is no more important topic that anyone could study. This book is a decent start, but in the end I was disappointed — primarily because he was too optimistic.

All of the accumulated evidence is that we are so far from any significant mitigation of global warming that it as if someone is writing the script for a very black comedy of errors. But Hersgaard ends in an upbeat mood, asserting that we’ll do this, because… well, because we have to. The alternative is too horrendous to contemplate.

The problem with that prognosis is two-fold. First, even people that believe global warming is taking place seldom have examined how very nasty the latter half of the twentieth century will probably be. Sure, some cautionary descriptions have floated around, but even picking a single example hides the panoramic sweep of the changes and the trauma. Much like looking at the aftermath of a hurricane or tsunami through a telescope, you only examine details by losing the ability to see everything else.

Second, collective action is naturally slow in coming when the costs of change will undoubtedly be high. Deniers have been criminal in making things worse by sowing doubt when there really is very little doubt. A reasonable prediction is that people won’t agree on the need for real action until much later in the game. A few hundred deaths from a clutch of tornadoes here, a few billion dollars in damage from hurricanes there, climbing food scarcity due to floods here and droughts there — it will all get shrugged off as just plain bad luck for another decade or more. And by that time…

Hertsgaard has a very well-chosen framing narrative here (although, as other reviewers have noted he gets too bathetic, especially towards the end of the book). He has recently become a father, and there is some cognitive dissonance between the horror story he keeps finding as he has researched this book, and the warm and happy feelings he has when he looks at his young daughter. He’s right to worry. In her anticipated lifespan she could easily witness changes that dramatically reduce any expectation she has for a pleasant life.

It’s too bad that this book hasn’t told the bad side of that story. Many pages were devoted to how, for example, a few tiny parts of the United States and other wealthy countries have made baby steps towards adaptation. And more pages turn to how difficult it is to prepare. But while he notes out that “floods kill thousands, drought can kill millions,” but he doesn’t go much deeper. Drought is potentially a problem in so many parts of the world that he should probably warn about tens of millions of deaths. And once people start seeing that, do we really expect them to peacefully beg for help? Water wars have been a hot topic of study in international relations for many years now — where are the interviews regarding that? With climate change triggering food scarcity, these problems are likely to cascade upon one another.

The book’s single instance of humor is inadequately dark: “You know the joke, don’t you? Under climate change the future is definitely going to be wetter. Or drier. Unless it’s both.”

I think the only honest conclusion is that the future is definitely going to be wetter, drier and much deadlier.

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Also see the New York Times review, Poisoning the Well , February 4, 2011.

Image from Queensland 2010-2011 flood—


Image from Thailand's 2011 flood—



Image from Hurricane Sandy—

(I guess I like the juxtaposition of one of the causes of climate change and one of the effects.)
­

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I skimmed the other reviews and it seems the main complaint with the book is that it is bleak and depressing and this is, apparently, the author's fault. I wish I could say I were shocked to see such blatant evidence that we as a culture now feel ourselves entitled not only to the pursuit of happiness in a really big house with a bunch of oversized televisions and closets full of crap we never use, but entitled also to books that will describe to us a catastrophe that could end human civilization and render the planet unfit for human habitation in an uplifting and hopeful manner. That's incredible. Sorry to say, buttercups, but as anyone with even the slightest modicum of a background in climate change will tell you, if this book has one major flaw (and it does), it is that it is too optimistic.

It's over-optimism rests primarily on the lack of analysis of where the solutions he presents will actually take us. Are they enough? He never says. He is a journalist by training, not a scientist, so he goes after the story (which he does with aplomb). As a result, I was left holding a grab-bag of potential policies to address climate change and absolutely no idea if that grab-bag would, if implemented universally beginning tomorrow, possibly be enough. I suspect they wouldn't.

(Yep, that's not optimism, but I've read dozens of books on climate change and at least a hundred articles and research papers and I've worked in the environmental field for a long time now, so this is based on something more than an innate propensity towards doom and gloom. Which, by the way, I don't have.)

That said, the material is comprehensive, engaging, well-written, fairly thorough, global in scope, and as a parent I appreciated the focus on his young daughter. I share his motivation with my work and writing and activism so I know all too well what he writes of when he writes of his fear and rage over his daughter's future. So I would not hesitate to recommend this to anyone with a basic to moderate understanding of climate change; anyone who is already well-versed in the subject will likely find it repetitive rather than illuminating. On a scientific basis I found Andrew Weaver's book better (he's one of the world's leading climatologists; look up Keeping Our Cool if interested) but Hot is still worthwhile.

If, on the other hand, you think books about climate change should be chipper and upbeat so you can feel good about your and your born & unborn children's prospects, might I recommend giving up and going back to Harlequin novels.

[Diane Kistner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard is a thoughtful, pragmatic exploration of climate change impacts and what we can (and are) doing about them. Far from a dry, distant-seeming treatise, Hertsgaard's book has a real heart; he asks us to visualize along with him how his young daughter (and all of our children) will survive the myriad changes that are already locked-in and unstoppable. The challenge, Hertsgaard tells us, is to "avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable."

As the author points out, even among those who are not in denial about climate change, there is still confusion about the difference between mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is what we do to try to prevent man-made global warming from proceeding apace. Adaptation is what we do to live with the consequences: the climate change that, in complex and interconnected ways, already is threatening our very ability to survive. Both approaches are critically important.

Hertsgaard devotes much of this book to presenting problems already being caused by climate change and showing how communities, businesses, and governments are responding. Unlike in the U.S., where climate change is still cast in an if-then light or denied outright by corporatist politicians, much of the world is now facing up to the dire facts. Some mitigation and adaptation efforts are doing more harm than good, but some (such as pro-business green development in Seattle, farmer-designed natural regeneration/agro-forestry [FMNR] in Africa, and far-sighted 200-year flood planning in the Netherlands) show much promise.

I found it hopeful that the huge global insurance industry already knows what is coming and is making decisions accordingly. This sometimes means refusing to insure people living in areas prone to major climate-driven devastation, but the actions of the insurance industry can be looked to as a barometer of what we need to do to adapt to climate change. Prudent risk management strategies on the part of businesses who are in the game for the long haul can help the planet as a whole adapt; self-interest, a powerful motivator, is not necessarily a dirty word.

Acceding the fact that most mitigation and adaptation efforts are large-scale/long-term and therefore must be subsidized by large corporations and governments, Hertsgaard also addresses what individuals can do. Learning about intercropping, permaculture, FMNR and other ways to build soil fertility to help store water and carbon is important. Growing some of our own food and supporting local farmers is something everyone can do. Becoming aware of how precious the water we use is and avoiding wasting it is essential if we are to survive. The interface between business and consumer is an area full of potential for adaptation. For example, I'm hoping we'll soon see reasonably priced family-use products such as biochar burners hit the market so folks can create their own carbon-sequestering/tilth-enhancing garden charcoal out of some of their waste.

As Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives...nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change." Hertsgaard makes a strong case that, if humans are to survive, we must get busy NOW adapting to climate change that is already happening and cannot be stopped. This book goes a long way toward helping us think in those terms.

[Melody · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a LOT of meat here, a lot of very important information. It's presented in a fairly dense format and is not terribly well-written. From a journalistic standpoint, it's well-done, but it's too dense for a book, in my opinion.

This book also tips into the bathetic on more than one occasion as Hertsgaard talks about fatherhood and the fact that his own personal, perfect, adorable princess of a child will be dealing with climate change. And though he does admit that there are other children in the world, one gets the sense that he doesn't find them nearly as important as his own princess. And, sure, we all feel that way to some degree, but journalistic integrity demands we at least try to suppress it a little whilst reporting on a topic we are trying to present as universal.

I'm perhaps focusing on the negatives so I can avoid talking about the primary message of this book, which seems to be that we are screwed as a planet. Deeply, irremediably screwed. Unless we all wake up by noon tomorrow and change our ways- and somehow I'm doubting that the corporations who now own my country are going to be cooperating with that.

Hertsgaard offers some crumbs of hope, but they are merely crumbs. I can't imagine my grandchildren's world, but life seems to be heading back towards "nasty, brutish and short" in a big hurry.

So: 4 stars for content, 3 for writing and 1 for sentimentality. Averaged out.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forced optimism in a survey of global warming and climate change

We are now at least a decade into what journalist Mark Hertsgaard terms the “second era of global warming,” which began sometime around the turn of the 20th century. As he writes, “The battle to prevent dangerous climate change was now over; the race to survive it has begun.”

Hertsgaard probably has as broad and deep an understanding of global warming and its consequences in the form of climate change of any nonscientist on the planet. He has been writing about the topic for more than two decades and has interviewed most of the major players in climate science climate-related government policy not just for this book, which involved five years of travel around the world, but for Earth Odyssey, a widely read investigation published in 1999 that reflected seven years of travel. The man knows whereof he writes!

Hot is the author’s attempt to find a hopeful path forward through the gathering storm of climate change. Throughout, he ponders the life his young daughter, Chiara, will face in adulthood. Much of Hot is written in an optimistic tone. Hertsgaard explores a laundry list of policies and procedures that, if widely implemented, will permit humanity to forestall the extremes of climate change and to adapt to its nonetheless unavoidable consequences. Some of the practices he touts — painting roofs white and planting trees in African fields, for example — could, in fact, achieve a great deal if universally employed. His theme is “Avoid the unmanageable, manage the unavoidable.” Distinguishing between mitigation — efforts to reduce carbon emissions — and adaptation — finding ways to adjust to the changing climate — Hertsgaard devotes most of the book to the latter. Previous writing on global warming has tended to focus on mitigation, which heavily involves government and corporate policy. Adaption consists largely of changing the way people and communities behave.

Unfortunately, though, the context in which he writes is not encouraging. We live in a world in which massive corporations spend millions to protect their short-term profits regardless of the consequences, major news media reflect the views of their corporate owners, the overwhelming majority of people deny the obvious, and policymakers demonstrate their affinity for the art of the possible rather than showing true leadership. To a knowledgeable reader, much of the optimism in Hot seems forced.

What it all boils down to is this: “We face a towering challenge. Countries that today are all but addicted to fossil fuels must quit carbon within the next two to three decades. Deforestation and other climate-damaging activities must also be brought to a halt worldwide. And even poor and emerging economies must halt almost all emissions by 2050. Yet even if we manage all this, it will give us merely a two-out-of-three chance to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees C about preindustrial levels, itself an achievement of dubious merit, for it will mean the lost of most of the world’s coral reefs, the disappearance of most of its mountain snowpacks, and enough sea level rise, eventually, to inundate the existing coastlines on every continent.”

The facts are disturbingly grim: even if the human race somehow manages to come to grips with the existential threat of climate change and to do everything recommended by the authors of the most alarming scientific reports, we are already locked into at least 30 years, and possibly as many as 50 years, of serious trouble. “Climate change will worsen existing conflicts over water supplies, energy sources, and weather-induced migration . . . Economic prosperity is also endangered. Approximately 25 percent of the gross national product of the United States is at risk from extreme weather events, according to the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.”

One of the greatest threats to civilization lies in our oceans. “Three feet of sea level rise over the next hundred years — which is near the low end of what scientists now expect — will pose enormous challenges . . . [S]ome scientists believe our civilization could experience three feet of sea level rise within the next fifty years.”

Perhaps equally problematic is the certainty of increasing drought. Much of Africa, a large swath of South Asia, and large portions of the United States, especially California, the Southwest, and the Great Plains, face intensifying water shortages.

There is no lack of horror stories available to illustrate the havoc these trends can create. However, over and above all the computer-modeled predictions for a steady increase in global temperatures over the coming decades is a much more horrific possibility: the potential that some unanticipated combination of circumstances will trigger “positive feedbacks that, in the worst case, could kick off some type of runaway greenhouse dynamics.”

As Hertsgaard explains, “Unfortunately, there is ample precedent for this kind of abrupt shift into climate chaos. Although the human mind tends to think in gradual, linear terms, ice records and other historical data show that climate shifts, when they occur, tend to happen suddenly and exponentially.”

Worrying about rising temperatures and their consequences is bad enough. But it’s the potential of a “sudden and exponential” shift that keeps me awake nights.

(From www.malwarwickonbooks.com)

[Dia Kristy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on EarthMark Hertsgaard

I thought I was done worrying about imminent disasters of global proportion after y2k.

Hah!

IN THE MEANTIME, environmentalists and other life-loving, future-looking, do-gooders need to stop argueing about mitigation and adaptation.

[mitigation = slowing, stopping, reversing climate change (soon to be climate chaos)

adaptation = adjusting/adapting to the changes]

We need them both! The more of the first we have, the less of the second we'll need.

KEEP IN MIND, the extent to which we can adjust is a whole lot more limited than you think and we are already toying with the upper limits of that

[Herman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Hot” Living through the next fifty years on Earth By Mark Hertsgaard well when reviewing this book let me go to the last chapter and answer his question
Epilogue: Chiara in the Year 2020
Frodo: I wish that none of this had ever happened.
Gandolf: Of course you do. But that is not for you to decide. All you have to do is decide what to do with the time you have been given.
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

I’ve arranged for you to receive this letter along with a copy of this book on your fifteenth birthday I wonder what kind of birthday you are having in the year 2020.

Dear Dad

Thank you for the book and for all your love and support I’m very blessed to be your daughter. That said, you had a few things wrong and a whole lot of things correct. You didn’t see the election of Donald Trump coming and for that I’m glad for these past four years have been horrible years in the fight against Climate Change and it’s clear that this is another lost decade, but you also didn’t see this virus coming. Our changing climate impacted all species and infections Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. With sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases being zoonotic meaning they originated in animals. This COVID-19 appears to be at first glance a possible climate related mutation and it will kill thousands and thousands of people and has changed our world as nothing else has in my lifetime at least. That said, it has helped the environment. We the world needed to stop polluting immediately but politically it couldn’t be done, too many people are making too much money, no incentive to change and certainly no incentive to make radical changes, well all that just changed and the air is cleaner the earth (it’s still very early but) The earth is starting to recover. In a way this might be the miracle we were hoping for but as the old saying goes careful what you pray for. So my birthday well it’s being done at home this year, and my wish and hope is that next year we can have it at my favorite restaurant or for that matter any public place, and that life somehow returns to a normal, much less fossil-fuel based world, time will tell. Now that mother nature has forced us in the direction you said we needed to take I hope that human nature keeps us on this path of recovery so that future birthday my be celebrated in hope and not in isolation and endless crisis.

[Frederick Gault · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author talks about mitigation along with stopping carbon fuels. Mitigation means that it's too late we better learn to deal with climate change - even if we woke up tomorrow with 100% sustainability the changes in motion will continue on our planet for thousands of years. There are glimmers of hope, it's not just another doom and gloom look at this ongoing crime, but times a wasting and nobody seems to be paying attention.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, this one took me a while.

It's not that "Hot" is a bad book. But it's not great either.

I should say that I almost immediately disliked the emotional framing Hertsgaard takes here. Maybe it's because I'm not a parent, but I found the passages where Hertsgaard writes about his daughter a bit trying, a bit cliche, too saccharine. As they essentially frame the work, those moments come up regularly, even if they don't dominate the book.

As a whole, Hertsgaard does do a nice job of explaining how climate change will effect the world, what we can do to make things better (essentially start a "Green Apollo" moment, wherein we muster the willpower to create positive change, just as Kennedy asked Americans to do in order to get to the moon). His text also looks at the ways in which certain countries/communities are preparing for climate change, through both mitigation (trying to lessen its effects) and adaptation (getting ready to deal with the effects we've already set in motion). Finally, the text does a nice job of reviewing some of the climate change political history -- all very new to me, learning about the climate change deniers and seeing the ways in which the deniers are essentially sponsored by carbon-burning companies. I guess that shouldn't be surprising, but to see the historical context in which the deniers worked was enlightening. And yet frustrating, as the deniers are often given equal journalistic/social weight in the US.

A good book, a necessary book, but one that could have engaged me more, even if it was clearly written with passion for making a better world.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to give this book a not-so-good rating given the importance of the subject, but the writing is not very engaging. Hertsgaard uses the birth of his daughter as the impetus for the book: what will the world be like when his daughter is an adult as global climate change continues? The picture is not very pretty and governments are not doing enough to lessen the impacts ahead. Climate change is here. We need to both adapt to what it brings and mitigate the causes so as to reduce what we have to adapt to. Read "The Long Emergency" by James Kunstler is better bet to see what's coming

[Radiantflux · Rating 3 out of 5]

17th book for 2016.

A good solid journalistic account of how some places (New Orleans; Chicago; Bangladesh; Netherlands; China) are or are not preparing (adapting) themselves for a wetter/hotter world under global warming. Quite US-centric, despite the international scope, but worth a read.

[Karie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me quite a while to read. Not because of its length or complexity, but because of the subject matter. Climate change is one of the most important issues facing our planet, but because of the enormity of the consequences, it is also one of the scariest.

“In triggering climate change, humanity has unwittingly launched a planetary experiment. Because this experiment has never been run before, and because it involves extremely complicated systems, knowing exactly how it will turn out is impossible.”

All of the science and scientific predictions in “Hot” agree that the results will be far from good. There is no disagreement that climate change is here and that it means dire things for many parts of Earth, the only thing that remains to be seen is how dire.

Because of all of this, I had to read “Hot” in parts. I could only take bits at a time…and some bit were easier than others. I am lucky enough to live in an area where one of the people profiled as being a positive force regarding climate change is laying good groundwork for our region going forward. I could focus on those successes and the things that the author outlined that individuals could do as I read the parts about what would occur if nothing was done.

I liked that Hertsgaard puts his daughter and another child at the forefront of this book. Because climate change is a gradual occurrence, it easier for many people to take the “I’ll think about that tomorrow” approach. But when again and again, Hertsgaard reminds the reader that tomorrow is alive in the children of today, it makes it harder and harder to push the reality away. We save mementoes, heirlooms and money for our children’s future – it’s hard to disagree that we need to make sure that the world they will inhabit shouldn’t be saved for them as well.

I was very interested to read that, “Bangladesh has done more over the past twenty years to understand and adapt to climate change than any other country in the world except for Great Britain and the Netherlands.” Which is amazing to me as well as ironic because, “There is a terrible injustice at the heart of the climate problem: climate change punishes the world’s poor first and worst, even though they did almost nothing to bring it on.”

Though there are some very hard and necessary truths in “Hot”, Mark Hertsgaard does a good job in walking the reader close to the ledge, but then showing them there is a ladder there. He deftly shifts the focus between the science of what will probably happen in the next fifty years to the actions that are being taken around the world to minimize and deal with the impacts. He does not let the reader off the hook or pretend that everything will be fine – but leads them to the blueprints of how things can be better.

I applaud the author for taking this subject on, especially with the concerted and highly funded campaign of lying with which climate change deniers are assaulting the world. This is about us, but more importantly, it is about our children. Not the children of tomorrow, but the children we are raising and protecting and loving today. “We are responsible for laying the foundations that future generations will build on, somewhat like the mason’s who laid the foundation of the European cathedrals that took several centuries to complete. They knew they would not live to see the final product of their work, but they also knew they needed to do very solid, precise work because of all the weight that was going to be placed on top of their work.”

We, too, need to take this long world view. We need to understand that tackling climate change is not only our most important challenge as a people but also possibly our greatest triumph.

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, this was published in 2011 so a great deal has changed - mostly with deteriorating conditions and situations. But one can read Hertsgaard's tale to his daughter with the idea in their mind to see where we were and what opportunities we passed up.

One thing to keep in mind was the difference between mitigation and adaptation - terms used throughout the book. Mitigation addresses the back end - how to limit conditions causing temperature rise and impact with examples of private transportation vs public and coal burning energy plants vs. wind turbines. On the other hand, adaptation is to reduce our vulnerability to the impact of climate change - planting shade trees to protect from extreme higher temperatures and sea walls to protect land from storm surge and sea level rise.

The author talks of the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009. Where countries began to admit that there was a need to limit the rise in global temperatures by 2°C. No agreement on how to do this. Nor was there any agreement on how to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Then there is the Green Apollo program which is an economic investment program in clean and sustainable energy. It calls on nations to make a commitment to spend a tiny portion of the national GDP (less than 1% annually) to fund research. Some joined but many others are evasive even today in 2022.

The hardest thing to acknowledge is that losses are inevitable and must be accepted. Prioritized as to what and where is not only going to be messy but needs to be sensible. Some areas will just not be fiscally possible and work-arounds must be found. But who decides? What will be the criteria for those decisions? And worse yet, who gets to tell the news to those areas and residents that they've been deemed impractical to save? Who bears the cost?

The author's viewpoint - and basically the letter to his daughter who is (hopefully) in her teens - is mostly that of a generalist trying to understand and explain the conflicting science that researchers are still grappling with. This is what the non-scientists might want to know in order to understand the consequences and opportunities that we are letting pass by. And maybe make their own decisions on what they can do to help - be it mitigation or adaption performed by their own actions.

2022-152

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I read last summer but had not yet written about here. It was an interesting time to read this, as we traveled to the UK on our summer family vacation, especially since we narrowly missed a major heat wave in the UK. And in the past several years of course there have been major heat waves and fires and all sorts of things. I think the author does a great job of summarizing a lot of the science around climate change as well as thinking through what to expect and how we will need to adapt. It's certainly a bit depressing, but it doesn't necessarily feel overly heavy handed.

The author frames the book around the fact that when his daughter was born he started to realize that her future may have even more climate changes and started thinking about how that will affect her through her life. I've seen some reviewers that felt this was sappy or just annoying (as if there were no other children on earth), but I think like any of us, sometimes your perspective changes when you have kids and for him, it helped him see something more personally rather than just the abstract data that he may have already known.

The challenge I had while reading this, however is that unfortunately I just read it last year so by then it was already more than 10 years old. So as I was reading, in the back of my mind I kept thinking, I wonder what the most current info is on such and such a subject that he was referring to. Because it had probably been 15 years since he had started researching and writing this book by the time I had read it. But overall I found it very interesting, especially when he would talk about unique innovations that were being done in different parts of the world (because he breaks it down to different things that are needed : on one hand the mitigation of the changes to try to avoid some of the worst, and on the other hand, adaptation to changes that will happen regardless). Definitely worth a read.

[catedemicorazon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this about 12-13 years after it was written is so weird.

I promised myself I'd stop reading old books about climate change because the science and situation has changed so much just in the past five years, but made an exception for this because of its focus on adaptation and its long term view. For all that the science is constantly being updated, the predictions for what the world will look like at 1.5 or 2.0 are pretty much settled.

So it was weird (and sometimes alarming) to find things that are already happening to our world, or to see how much things are still the same. To see the same arguments for the energy transition that we use now, and know that we are still so far away from doing what needs to be done. To read about the 100 billion dollar climate finance and promise just as it was being made, or the promise to stop subsidizing fossil fuels, and know that they are still unfulfilled.

I appreciated the focus on stories around adaptation, but all that said I still found it dry and a chore to get through.

[Tim Duff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was at our vacation rental so I decided to read it not knowing how much it would affect the way I think about climate change. It brings the reader face-to-face with the reality of what happens if we ignore the facts about climate change. It talks about how the poor will be the most affected by the causes generated by the bigger countries such as the United States & China. It looks at what conditions will be like in 2050 unless changes are made now and how temperature rise will contribute greatly to ice melt of the North Pole and Antarctica causing sea levels to rise affecting cities worldwide. It offers suggestions to improve where we are now. The book was written in 2010 so we are eleven years beyond that as President Biden tries to pass a climate change “Green Bill” in Congress right now. It has already been scaled back and will not get us where we need to be anytime soon. It will take all of us to turn the ship around and I’m willing to do my part.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good! This was written about 10 years ago (10 years before I read it, I mean) so it was very interesting to note how we viewed the climate crisis then vs. now. And how we definitely have not done enough in our adaptation and mitigation efforts. A lot of research went into this book. Very accessible language, a lot of anecdotes and real world examples. The way he was writing it for his young daughter was very sweet, and I think it puts the shortened timeline we have into perspective.

[FMLDNR · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a very good book.

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good, but the information is twenty or so years old

[Lisa Eirene · Rating 1 out of 5]

I get what the author was trying to do and I am a parent and worried about the future for my kids, but I got so sick of the rambling stories about his kid. I gave up on the book.

[Amy Timm · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the first 2/3, I didn't finish the last bit.

[Klaudia · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the best, most clear set of reasons and reflections I’ve ever read. Everything he writes is brilliant.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, thorough, and balanced piece of investigative journalism. The author traveled worldwide and talked with citizens, scientists, and government officials in several countries which an overwhelming majority of climate scientists say are facing increasingly serious problems related to climate change. He explains the problems of climate inertia (the fact that even if humanity stopped putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere today, the amounts already added would keep driving more climate farther for decades to come) and the inadequacy of the alternatives we've identified such as wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and hydroelectric, simply because of the sheer amount of energy we extract from fossil fuels every day. He also explores the distinction between mitigation, i.e. reducing our impact on climate and weather patterns, and adaptation, i.e. improving our ability to cope with higher sea levels, stronger and more frequent storms, droughts, heat waves, etc.

I said this is a balanced presentation. The thing that makes it balanced is not giving equal time to the arguments against climate change; those are sponsored by the fossil fuel industry and are much like the arguments subsidized by the tobacco companies for so long that tried to persuade the public that tobacco was not carcinogenic or addictive, or that the matter was at least undetermined. Actually, some of the same people that the tobacco industry paid so well to make those arguments are now collecting the same kind of funding from the fossil fuel industry to cause doubt and confusion on this issue.

The balance here, rather, is in his detailed descriptions of strategies that some communities and/or countries are taking that are forward-looking and offer their people a much more liveable future than those of some other places he visited. This is not all doom-and-gloom; Hertsgaard offers hope as well as warning, and practical steps we can take as individuals, families, and communities, and press our elected representatives in the government to get going on a larger scale.

This author was motivated to write this book when he became a father and was wondering what kind of world his child will have to live in. It's an appeal to all of us to try to make things better for all the people who are children now and for their children to come. I have children who are adults and grandchildren in elementary school, and this really resonates for me.

[Theresa Leone Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hertsgaard wrote this for his young daughter; he writes that she will be the one, along with all other young people, to contend with the changes in weather that global warming is causing. I was in the middle of the book when Hurricane Sandy hit my area, the New Jersey shore, during which we lost power for a week but suffered no other damage. Not so for too many people here and in New York. We've had two hurricanes now in two years, and after living in New York City for years and here on the shore for years, that is a first. Hertsgaard claims that freak weather systems will continue to batter the United States and the rest of the world because of the effects of global warming. His book, however, is not just doom and gloom. Despite the fact that those in charge in New Orleans have apparently learned nothing after Katrina, and Florida being willfully ignorant about the dangers they face, there are smart people out there who are not just doing the work to prevent further warming but are actively adapting their areas so that they survive, places in the U.S. like Seattle, Chicago, and New York, and other countries, like Holland, which Hertsgaard claims has the best ideas that they are implementing, not just for the next fifty years but the next 200, and Burkina Faso, another place that is making huge changes to adapt to changing weather, just to name a couple. Great book, very well written, but I couldn't help thinking as I read that he is, unfortunately, preaching to the choir. If you just don't care because you ignorantly believe this won't affect you or your children, or worse, you are a denier, chances are you didn't pick this one up to read. Unfortunate. Highly recommend!

[Nell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Global Weirdness first, then Hot. They make a good pair. Global Weirdness lays out the science in a dispassionate way; Hot makes it personal.

Hertsgaard can’t win—other reviewers have judged him both too depressing and too optimistic. I think the book is not depressing enough to spur people to action, and way too optimistic, given the success of the disinformation campaign waged by the old-energy interests, the polarity of the American political system and the gullibility of the electorate which perpetuates it, tensions between the developed and less developed nations, and sheer inertia.

Droughts, water shortages, and more frequent wildfires; floods, more (and more intense) hurricanes and stronger storm surges; disruption of food crops from changing weather patterns and more insect pests; increasing allergens and pest-borne diseases; rising sea levels that submerge houses, roads, airports, cities, and islands and infiltrate farmland with salt; the resulting violence from nine billion people trying to crowd into less habitable space; extinction of plant species that might have provided pharmaceuticals to cure diseases; acidification of the ocean, with detrimental effects on the food chain; more frequent heat waves that endanger people and stress the power grid, and just plain day-after-day discomfort from stretches of humid 90+-degree temperatures that don’t cool down much at night. Some places will suffer more than others, but everyplace will be affected.

I have a chance of living until 2050, when the earth will be well along the road to the point where it can no longer sustain human life. I hope I don’t.

[Adam Mahlum · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good but not great book about climate change. The book is really light on science and economics but excels at examining how climate change might affect different countries depending on where they are located. There is one excellent chapter in the book--about the Dutch and how they deal with a hostile climate. Unfortunately there are also a few weak chapters in the book. Rather than reading "Hot" I recommend reading "The Quest" by Daniel Yergin, which does a much more thorough job of explaining the economic issues surrounding climate and energy. There is also a fascinating chapter in the book Superfreakanomics that puts forth various geo-engineering ideas that could possibly mitigate the effects of climate change.

As an citizen of the world I sympathize with Hertsgaard and am convinced that climate change is real, yet my years of studying economics and politics has convinced me that modern society does not have the tools (or willpower) to effectively deal with a threat unless it is a clear and present danger. Climate change which is dervied from chaos theory is too complicated for most people to understand, hence it is easy to manipulate public opinion.

Our only hope(s) are that either climate change is overblown or that the projections of its effects are on the low end OR we figure out how to effectively geo-engineer the problem to eliminate climate change once it is upon us.

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting quick read on global climate change and global warming. The conceit of the book is that of a letter to the author's newborn, who is several years old by the time the book is finished being written. The conceit got a little old, but never unbearable. This book has further convinced me that people in the United States have been fooled in the same manner as the issues around tobacco were minimized and in some cases by the same people. But in reality I think the climate change scientists made it easy. I think as long as we are talking a 2 degree average rise in temperature, people are incapable of measuring that on there own and at least in the United States are too stupid to think for themselves about what that means. If global climate change was only about the melting of glaciers and arctic ice and Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and numbers of days over 90 degrees in a year and the date of ice breaking on rivers and the first day of birds returning and other pretty darn easy to measure facts ... well ... lying to yourself and others is an adaptation as well as many ... as was our moving to one of the more likely safe-ish places in the US from a climate change perspective.

The good news from this book is that there is still an awful lot of stuff that can be done to make the problem less bad for rich people like 99% of the people who live in the US.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hot: Living Through The Next Fifty Years On Earth by Mark Hertsgaard is a book that I would recommend for anyone seriously wanting to learn more about the state we are in in regards to climate change. It is not a feel good book, and it is not all gloom and doom. I think it is imperative that we, for the sake of our kids and grandkids, get ourselves educated and start to heed the call to action. This book points out ways this action is already taking place and gives ideas for what can be done at the local and even individual level.

This is not a problem that is going away it is only getting worse with each month of inactivity. The copyright on this book is 2011 and in many ways it is already dated. References to Katrina can now be updated to Sandy. Many things have gotten worse since he wrote this book.
It is well written and highly informative. The author writes it from his own personal perspective of being a new father and what the future has in store for his 5 year old daughter. This theme is well woven through the entire book.

[Blaise Lucey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was looking for a grim tale about the future of the world from climate change. Not tips on how to prevent it, because I don't think we're going to "prevent" or "mitigate," I think we're going to adapt. In short, I wanted a fact-fueled prophecy.

That's essentially what this book is - a dark, very dark, nightmare of the near-future interspersed with Hertsgaard's anxieties about his young daughter's future. He travels the world inspecting the damage wrought by the acidification of the ocean, the, uh, saltification of coastal farms, and the continuing destruction of our civilization via bigger natural disasters and general governmental reluctance.

The book doesn't just cover in-depth trends in major U.S. cities, but also the effects of climate change in places like China and Bangladesh.

Rather than solutions, Hertsgaard whimsically proposes (toward the end of the book) that there's still time to change things. But his narrative leaves little doubt that it's not what he believes, just what he felt compelled to write.

[Jing · Rating 3 out of 5]

hertsgaard focuses more on adaptation than mitigation, but i still wish he'd spent some more time on cap & trade/ cap & dividend and carbon taxes, as well as on how to tackle the ineptness of the un framework convention on climate change (cop conferences, kyoto treaty, etc.). he spends a whole chapter on the moral obligation of rich countries to compensate poor countries for the climate change effects which they have caused but stops short of calling for specific actions from specific offices. he does a good job of stressing that families, businesses, neighborhoods, cities - social organizations at every level - should have a climate change contingency plan for the future. the part that i liked best is his focus on social context (rather than technology) for developing and implementing long-term adaptation plans and along with that, his focus on the local rather than the national. the parts about his daughter sometimes got too sappy.