Losing Earth : a recent history / Nathaniel Rich.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change--including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.

The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon--the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.

Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry's coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves.

Like John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth , Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction: The Reckoning (p. 3)
• Part I Shouts in the Street: 1979-1982
• 1 The Whole Banana: Spring 1979 (p. 13)
• 2 Mirror Worlds: Spring 1979 (p. 27)
• 3 Between Clambake and Chaos: July 1979 (p. 33)
• 4 Enter Cassandra, Raving: 1979-1980 (p. 39)
• 5 A Very Aggressive Defensive Program: 1979-1980 (p. 47)
• 6 Tiger on the Road: October 1980 (p. 53)
• 7 A Deluge Most Unnatural: November 1980-September 1981 (p. 65)
• 8 Heroes and Villains: March 1982 (p. 71)
• 9 The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe: 1982 (p. 79)
• Part II Bad Science Fiction: 1983-1988
• 10 Caution Not Panic: 1983-1984 (p. 87)
• 11 The World of Action: 1985 (p. 101)
• 12 The Ozone in October: Fall 1985-Summer 1986 (p. 107)
• 13 Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.: Fall 1987-Spriiif 1988 (p. 113)
• Part III You Will See Things That You Shall Believe: 1988-1989
• 14 Nothing but Bonfires: Summer 1988 (p. 125)
• 15 Signal Weather: June 1988 (p. 129)
• 16 Woodstock for Climate Change: June 1988-April 1989 (p. 135)
• 17 Fragmented World: Fall 1988 (p. 143)
• 18 The Great Includer and the Old Engineer: Spring 1989 (p. 149)
• 19 Natural Processes: May 1989 (p. 155)
• 20 The White House Effect: Spring-Fall 1989 (p. 161)
• 21 Skunks at the Garden Party: November 1989 (p. 165)
• Afterword: Glass-Bottomed Boats (p. 175)
• A Note on the Sources (p. 205)
• Acknowledgements (p. 207)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

While it is a given that early modern Spanish Catholicism promoted and justified conquest, Conover (Augustana Univ.) eschews the denunciation of missionaries who ran roughshod over indigenous culture to focus instead on how Catholicism and, in particular, the cult of local saints promoted loyalty to imperial policies. The author centers his analysis on San Felipe de Jesus, an almost accidental saint, whose life connects Spain to Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, and Rome. Appropriated as a son of Mexico City, this saint, who performed no miracles, provides an apt foil to the much better known Virgin of Guadalupe. Highlighting the political significance of inserting local saints into the liturgical calendar, the author describes the emergence of the cult of Catholic saints in Mexico during the Habsburg period, then traces transformations under the Bourbons, and the enduring significance of Catholic saints during New Spain's transition to the independent nation of Mexico. A global perspective strengthens the book's appeal. The new prism through which Conover views Mexican history makes this volume an important source for graduate students and for established scholars. Its tight organization and lucid argument make it accessible to undergraduates. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Joan Meznar, Eastern Connecticut State University

Booklist Review

Rich, a novelist (King Zeno, 2018) and journalist, turns his widely discussed 2018 investigation for the New York Times Magazine into an exceedingly well-written history of the early political battles over addressing climate change. This is, in fact, a must-read handbook for everyone concerned about our planet's future. Readers will gain invaluable insights from Rich's exemplary reportage, and he also provides a road map for avoiding past missteps. This meticulous account of myriad missed opportunities to do the right thing for the environment and humanity over the past four decades is truly galling. Rich shows how political weakness, unfounded economic fear, and relentless preference for willful ignorance over thoughtful action dominated the approach to the threat of global warming during the 1980s. He tracks the birth of climate denialism and addresses how and why the fossil-fuel industry turned against science, and politicians went along with it. Nearly every conversation that we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979, he writes. By taking readers into the meetings and among the players, Rich shines a necessary light on the predominant issue of our time. Losing Earth is eloquent, devastating, and crucial.--Colleen Mondor Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

The time to have averted worldwide climate change was long agoand scientists knew that very fact a long time ago as well.As New York Times Magazine writer at large Rich (King Zeno, 2017, etc.) notes at the beginning, "nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979." Indeed, that understanding was largely unclouded by oppositional politics in a time when the president was not proud to proclaim that he was too smart to believe in climate change. The scientific consensus, then as now, was that human activities had altered the environment; the question was what could be done about it. Today, Rich notes, the odds of doing anything meaningful to slow climate change to an overall average warming of "only" 2 degrees Celsius are slimabout one in 20, he reckons, and even that will mean the extinction of coral reefs, rising sea levels, coastal flooding, and a host of other woes. Rich charts that 1979 terminus to a government study of coal emissions, which, if allowed to continue unmodified, would result in "significant and damaging" changes in the atmosphere. Other federal reports of the period were just as presciente.g., one that "warned that humanity's fossil fuel habit would lead inexorably to a host of intolerable' and irreversible' disasters" while recommending the transition to renewal energy sources. Big money buried these findings, along with a leadership that was reluctant to "change the national model of energy production" and, indeed, the world economy. By Ronald Reagan's time, the reluctance became intransigence. By the time of George W. Bush, business and government leaders had "consolidated behind the position that the benefits of emissions cuts should be weighed against immediate economic costs." By today, Rich warns, "the distant perils of climate change are no longer very distant"and they grow closer every day.A maddening book full of what-ifs and the haunting suspicion that if treated as a political problem and not as a matter of life and death, climate change will cook everyone's geese. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.