McKibben in NYRB

I don’t have a new intro, so I’ll just steal my last one:

"Every column Bill McKibben writes on climate change becomes more dread-laden and portentous, but I never stop enjoying them."

The latest is "The Coming Meltdown," in the New York Review of Books. There’s not a lot of new info in it (unless you’re interested in the two books reviewed), but as always, it’s engagingly written and contains some juicy quotes. How about this, from Harvard’s James McCarthy:

Scientists are by training and nature conservative and … have probably underestimated our impact. Fifty years from now — I hope I’m wrong — I think you may be living in a world where you don’t go outside between one and four in the afternoon.

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Whee!

And some classic McKibben:

It is hard not to approach this year’s oncoming winter in an elegiac mood …. We are forced to face the fact that a century’s carelessness is now melting away the world’s storehouses of ice, a melting whose momentum may be nearing the irreversible. It’s as if we were stripping the spectrum of a color, or eradicating one note from every octave. There are almost no words for such a change: it’s no wonder that scientists have to struggle to get across the enormity of what is happening.