Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

Product Description A fresh take on climate change by a renowned journalist driven to protect his daughter, your kids, and the next generation who?ll inherit the problemFor twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard has investigated global warming for outlets including the?New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and The Nation. But the full truth did not hit home until he became a father and, soon thereafter, learned that climate change had already arrived?a century earlier than forecast?with impacts bound to worsen for decades to come. Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara, now five yea rs old, is part of what he has dubbed "Generation Hot"--the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption. HOT is a father's cry against climate change, but most of the book focuses on s olutions, offering a deeply reported blueprint for how all of us?as parents, communities, companies and countries?can navigate this unavoidable new era. Combining reporting from across the nation and around the world with personal reflections on his daugh ter?s future, Hertsgaard provides "pictures" of what is expected over the next fifty years: Chicago?s climate transformed to resemble Houston?s; dwindling water supplies and crop yields at home and abroad; the redesign of New York and other cities against mega-storms and sea-level rise. Above all, he shows who is taking wise, creative precautions. For in the end, HOT is a book about how we?ll survive. Amazon.com Review A Q&A with Mark Hertsgaard, Author of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on EarthQ: You write about your daughter Chiara quite a bit in Hot. In the prologue, you describe the moment when you came to understand just what climate change would mean for her. You had a kind of terrible epiphany while crossing Westminster Bridge in London. A: Yeah, that was on October 18, 2005. Hurricane Katrina had struck seven weeks before, and Vanity Fair had sent me to London to report what became the cover story for its first "green" issue. I did an interview with David King, the chief science adviser to the British government, who was way ahead of the curve on this stuff. He shattered the conventional framing of the climate problem and made me see that we had entered a radically new era. See, from the time global warming emerged on the world?s agenda in the late 1980s, public discussion had focused on two basic questions: Is global warming real? And if so, how can it be stopped before it gets really dangerous, which is to say before it triggers outright climate change, with stronger storms, deeper droughts, harsher heat waves, and so forth? But King told me that British scientists had shown that global warming had already triggered climate change. His specific example was the record heat wave that battered Europe in the summer of 2003, when corpses were piling up outside the morgue in Paris. About half of the excessive temperatures of the 2003 heat wave, King said, were attributable to man-made global warming.Anyway, in essence David King told me climate change had arrived one hundred years sooner than scientists had expected. And that wasn?t the worst of it. He went on to explain that the physical inertia of the climate system-the laws of physics and chemistry-guaranteed that average global temperatures would keep rising for another thirty to forty years, even if humanity somehow was to halt all greenhouse gas emissions overnight. The upshot was that our civilization was locked in to a large amount of future climate change no matter how many solar panels, electric cars, and other green technologies we eventually embraced.Q: Is that why you say your daughter belongs to what you call Generation Hot?A: Not only my daughter. Every child on earth born after June 23, 1988, belongs to Generation Hot. Generation Hot includes some two billion young people, all of whom have grown up under global warming and are fated to spend the rest of their lives confront