Climate: Will We Lose the Endgame?

Bill McKibben, July 10, 2014 Issue

Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent
by Gabrielle Walker
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 388 pp., $27.00

What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change
a report by the Climate Science Panel of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
28 pp., March 2014

Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment
a report by the US Global Change Research Program
829 pp., May 2014 

We may be entering the high-stakes endgame on climate change. The pieces—technological and perhaps political—are finally in place for rapid, powerful action to shift us off of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, the players may well decide instead to simply move pawns back and forth for another couple of decades, which would be fatal. Even more unfortunately, the natural world is daily making it more clear that the clock ticks down faster than we feared. The whole game is very nearly in check.

Let us begin in Antarctica, the least-populated continent, and the one most nearly unchanged by humans. In her book about the region, Gabrielle Walker describes very well current activities on the vast ice sheet, from the constant discovery of new undersea life to the ongoing hunt for meteorites, which are relatively easy to track down on the white ice. For anyone who has ever wondered what it’s like to winter at 70 degrees below zero, her account will be telling.