The Heat Is on: The High Stakes Battle over Earth's Threatened Climate [Hardcover]

The world is behaving strangely these days: grassfires rage across millions of acres in Texas and Mongolia, heat waves kill hundreds in Milwaukee and Bombay, floods ravage North Dakota and Oman. Ross Gelbspan, a veteran journalist, seizes on these and other alarming examples to argue that global warming is fast upon us--and, more to the point, that the multitrillion-dollar energy concerns are doing their best to keep the world public from knowing about widespread changes in the global climate caused, in part, by the fossil fuel-induced destruction of the ozone layer. His polemic is always interesting, if often arguable, and Gelbspan tempers his attack on Big Energy with a reasonable proposal that alternative-energy programs be given greater funding priority in the United States (the rest of the industrial world having already made great investments in geothermal, solar, and wind energy).

YA?Like Our Stolen Future (Dutton, 1996), this is a readable and cogent discussion of important environmental issues. Gelbspan writes a response to what he terms the oil and coal industries' attempts to downplay the coming emergency of global warming. Covering the confusing issues of the current debate, he explains why fluctuating temperatures, not just warmer temperatures, are part of the evidence for climate change caused by mass industrialization. He convincingly describes the possible outcomes for the planet and society if science is ignored: plagues, flooding, starvation, and anarchy. Arguments against the dire climatic possibilities, and those who espouse them, are thoroughly discussed, referenced, and disputed. The detailed index and bibliographic notes to each chapter make this book a comprehensive reference source as well an educational work of nonfiction. Rebuttals from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to well-known climate-change skeptics are included in an appendix. An important addition to YAs' store of knowledge concerning the planet they are to inherit.?Carol DeAngelo, Garcia Consulting Inc., EPA Headquarters, Washington, DC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Irritated by a minority viewpoint among climatologists (that human activity is not the cause of global warming), Gelbspan launches an energetic criticism of their ideas and their sponsors. Formerly a newspaper reporter on environmental topics, Gelbspan earnestly believes that without immediate drastic action, humanity faces an imminent apocalypse of rising sea levels, desertification, and superdestructive storms. With the consequences of inertia as so stated, no wonder Gelbspan excoriates a half-dozen scientists, the conservative newspapers and Republican politicians who cite them, and the coal and oil interests that subsidize their organizations. After confounding his enemies, Gelbspan dilates on extant programs to decrease carbon dioxide emissions, such as international conventions or market-based inducements, all of which he argues are inadequate to the crisis: carbon taxes and a massive clean-energy technology donation by the West to China and India (to stop them from a coal-burning binge) are his desired policies. With interest in the entire subject bound to increase with the next UN environment conference, slated for fall 1997 in Kyoto, Gelbspan's alarm bell will doubtlessly be heard. Gilbert Taylor

Old-fashioned muckraking against ``big oil and big coal'' meets new scientific theories on global warming. Forest fires rage through Mongolia and Texas. Killer heat waves fell hundreds in Calcutta and Chicago. Floods consume Nepal and Oman. Deserts form in Greece and Spain. These and countless other alarming recent incidents form the backdrop for Gelbspan's impassioned, if perhaps too alarmist, book. Gelbspan, a veteran reporter with such papers as the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize winner, wants the reader to know about these harbingers of disaster; he opens with a dire scenario about the melting of the Antarctic ice cap after the greenhouse effect heats up the planet's surface enough to alter normal weather cycles. ``The truth underlying the increasingly apparent changes in global climate has largely been kept out of public view,'' Gelbspan argues. Why? Precisely, he continues, because the multitrillion-dollar oil and gas industries have conspired to keep that truth hidden. He goes on to examine the energy industries' financing of reports that deny the disappearance of the ozone layer and other manifestations of human-caused climatic change, charging that the science in those reports is tainted by big money. Gelbspan's own command of science sometimes seems a little fuzzy, and the reader is left to judge just how evil the energy companies' acting out of clear self-interest really is, but it all adds up to an interesting polemic. And Gelbspan gives a good account of alternative-energy programs, which he urges be given greater funding priority; with the proper tax incentives, he maintains, ``climate-friendly energy technologies could instantly become competitive with fossil fuels.'' Is the sky falling? After reading this book, you might be inclined to think so. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan exposes the machinations of oil and coal companies and conservative politicians to undermine the public confidence in science and thereby defer action against global warming. This riveting expose is a spirited call to action against the corporate disinformation campaign that threatens us all.