A disturbing yet realistic examinations of the consequences of a warmer world.
Dire and detailed description of what tragedies are in the making for humanity as global warming continues its seemingly inexorable rise.
Guzman (Law/Univ. of California; How International Law Works, 2010, etc.) writes that climate change is “perhaps the greatest international challenge of this century and beyond,” yet “people have not come to accept how serious it is.” By focusing on the human cost of global warming, his hope is that people will act. What will happen, Guzman asks, if the Earth’s temperature rises—and this is a conservative estimate—a mere 2 degrees centigrade? Plenty, as it turns out, and none of it good. A series of well-researched and clearly written chapters outlines the consequences. Rising seas will cause some nations, such as the Maldives, to simply sink. In other poor, low-lying nations, flooding and increasingly violent storms and the subsequent social disruption may create untold millions of “climate refugees”—20 million in Bangladesh alone. As glaciers melt, ancient water-management systems will be disrupted as new patterns of flood and drought emerge. Fresh water will become scarcer, and perhaps more than 1 billion people will have access to far less water than they do now. As climate refugees huddle together in inevitably crowded camps, new diseases will emerge with fewer resources to treat and prevent them. The social and political costs will be enormous; governments will be overwhelmed by the failure of basic systems, from food production to sanitation. Those areas of the world—say, the Middle East or Pakistan and India—already dangerously enmeshed in enmity may explode into violence as the battle for resources, especially water, intensifies. Though exact scenarios are difficult to predict, such dangers, notes Guzman, are real. But global warming is not unmanageable if we can simply muster the political will to enact and enforce regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
A disturbing yet realistic examinations of the consequences of a warmer world.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-993387-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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