Poisoning the Well

Mark Hertsgaard's book Hot was reviewed in the New York Times.

I haven’t had the talk yet with my kids: my 11-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter. I mean the one about global warming, about what’s coming. But then, we grown-ups haven’t had the talk yet among ourselves. Not really. We don’t seem to know how: the topic is apparently too big and scary. Or perhaps, for the uninformed (or misinformed), not scary enough.

We might take a cue from Mark Hertsgaard’s Hot, which raises the emotional stakes while keeping a clear head. This was the first book on climate change that not only frightened me — plenty have done that — but also broke my heart. It happened first on the dedication page, where he writes, “For my daughter, Chiara, who has to live through this.” And again, as I read his epilogue: a letter addressed to Chiara on her 15th birthday, in 2020 — a “cardinal date,” Hertsgaard rightly calls it. “According to the scientists I interviewed,” he tells her, “many, many things have to happen by 2020 if this planet is to remain a livable place.” That is, if the storms, droughts, rising sea levels and mass extinctions of species are to remain within “manageable” limits.