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  • Me and Elizabeth Kolbert

    Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, based on three well-received articles she wrote for the New Yorker (the articles are no longer available online, but you can read an excerpt from the book here; Grist reviewed it here.) It's a journal of her travels to various parts of the world being directly impacted by global warming, along with a clear-eyed assessment of global-warming politics in the U.S. It's probably the best single book on climate change to date.

    I'll be chatting with Kolbert tomorrow. What should I ask her?


  • Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe gives climate change a human face

    Elizabeth Kolbert began building a fan base among political junkies with a series of vivid New Yorker profiles that were collected in 2004’s The Prophet of Love. Ranging from George Pataki and Hillary Clinton to Regis Philbin and Al Sharpton, from title character Rudy Giuliani to former Weatherman Kathy Boudin, Kolbert’s pieces were filled with […]

  • Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof

    Climate scientists grow more concerned as Rome burns, Nero fiddles In most fields of science, lay opinion tends to be more alarmist than scientific opinion, says Carbon Mitigation Initiative codirector Robert Socolow. “But, in the climate case, the experts — the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do ice […]

  • Plus Ca (Climate) Change …

    Ancient empires crushed by changing climate — not that you should worry Elizabeth Kolbert continues her exploration of climate change in the second of a three-part series in The New Yorker. She begins with a look at the world’s first great empire, founded 4,300 years ago on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. […]

  • Shock and Thaw

    New Yorker launches three-part exploration of climate change Writer Elizabeth Kolbert must have single-handedly accelerated global warming with the jet fuel she burned visiting the Arctic, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and the Antarctic to research a big three-part series on climate change for The New Yorker. What did she find? Well, it’s all melting. The Alaskan […]