Two new books conclude we are warming ourselves right into oblivion

"The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth"
by Tim Flannery
Atlantic Monthly Press,
357 pp., $24

"Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change"
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Bloomsbury, 192 pp., $22.95

Do we really need two more books about climate change? I'll confess this question ran through my mind when Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers" and Elizabeth Kolbert's "Field Notes from a Catastrophe" landed on my desk. Having now devoured them both, I can answer emphatically: Yes, we do. These two books are urgent dispatches from what environmental writer Bill McKibben recently called the "Oh crap" era of global warming (actually, he used an earthier term, but he was writing for Rolling Stone). Both are brief, gripping, well-written and, though they cover some of the same ground, distinct in style and focus. Together they will scare you out of your wits.

What has changed since McKibben's own book, "The End of Nature," came out in 1989? For starters, climate reporting has shifted its emphasis from concern over what could happen in a warmer world to what already has. Kolbert, whose book grew out of a three-part series published in The New Yorker last spring, opens with a series of snapshots from a warming Alaska: houses listing as permafrost melts, massive fires in record-breaking summer heat, forced abandonment of low-lying native villages. Flannery, spinning the globe, points to bleached and dying coral reefs in the tropics, beetles and budworms ravaging boreal conifer forests, the extinction of Costa Rica's golden toad and a looming water crisis in Australia — all the direct result of warming temperatures.

But beyond mounting evidence from the field, there is a marked change of tone among climatologists. We used to hear about the global warming "debate," but as Kolbert writes, "in legitimate scientific circles, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming" or the role of "anthropogenic emissions" in causing it. You may be anxious about climate change — but the experts who really know about it are hysterical. "In the years to come this issue will dwarf all the others combined," insists Flannery.

Flannery and Kolbert adopt very different strategies to hammer home essentially the same grim conclusion. Kolbert, a reporter, confesses that her choices of where to travel and whom to interview were driven by "all the usual journalistic reasons": a chance invitation to join a research trip, a promising phone call, a seat opening up on someone's helicopter. Her book unfolds in a series of finely etched vignettes, each with its own tight narrative arc. In a slushy tent at a fast-melting research station in Greenland, she muses on "feedback loops" that can trigger accelerating, self-reinforcing disasters like the "total disintegration" of the Greenland ice sheet in a matter of decades. Two evolutionary biologists at a mosquito lab in Eugene, Ore., explain how global warming is starting to drive evolution.

A robotic Bush appointee keeps repeating, "We act, we learn, we act again," whenever Kolbert presses her on key issues like emissions caps or our refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol. In two chilling pages, Kolbert crystallizes the criminal inanity of the current administration's climate-change policy.

Kolbert never editorializes, but her message comes through all the louder for her restraint: Given what we know about climate change and how we, particularly we Americans, are responding, one can only conclude that we have deliberately chosen to destroy our environment and ourselves.

Flannery, a college professor at the University of Adelaide and a familiar radio commentator, tackles the subject not as a reportorial fly on the wall but as a concerned and deeply informed citizen of the world. After a quick nod to James Lovelock's "Gaia" theory of the Earth as a single self-regulating organism, he swiftly rolls out a brief history of climate through the eons, culminating in the "long summer" that ushered in human civilization at the end of the last glacial period. But he really clicks into gear when he gets to the havoc being wreaked by the current human-induced warming — and the even more catastrophic changes on the horizon, including the possible failure of the Gulf Stream and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest in less than 40 years.

Flannery warns that another half-century of business as usual will result in the "inevitable collapse of civilization." But rather than despair, he proceeds to lay out our options, from alternative energy sources to massive global engineering projects like injecting compressed CO{+2} into the ocean depths. To his credit, he also details exactly what each of us can do to limit our personal carbon emissions, starting with home fuel use and driving habits.

Of the scores of fascinating facts and figures that Flannery packs into his book, one leapt out: Half of the total energy generated since the Industrial Revolution has been consumed in the past 20 years. In other words, we're putting the carbon into the atmosphere — and now it's up to us to do something about it.

Seattle author David Laskin's most recent book, "The Children's Blizzard," is out in paperback from Harper Perennial.