global warming

Book review – Otherlands: A World in the Making

7-minute read

Our planet has been many different worlds over its 4.5-billion-year history. Imagining what they were like is hard—with our limited lifespan, deep time eludes us by its very nature. Otherlands, the debut of Scottish palaeontologist Thomas Halliday, presents you with a series of past worlds. Though this is a non-fiction book thoroughly grounded in fact, it is the quality of the narrative that stands out. Beyond imaginative metaphors to describe extinct lifeforms, some of his reflections on deep time, taxonomy, and evolution are simply spine-tingling.

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Book review – Notes from Deep Time: A Journey Through Our Past and Future Worlds

6-minute read

Deep time is, to me, one of the most awe-inspiring concepts to come out of the earth sciences. Getting to grips with the incomprehensibly vast stretches of time over which geological processes play out is not easy. We are, in the words of geologist Marcia Bjornerud, naturally chronophobic. In Notes from Deep Time, author Helen Gordon presents a diverse and fascinating collection of essay-length chapters that give 16 different answers to the question: “What do we talk about when we talk about deep time?” This is one of those books whose title is very appropriate.

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Book review – Mammalian Paleoecology: Using the Past to Study the Present

7-minute read

Scottish geologist Charles Lyell quipped that the present is the key to the past. To say that the reverse also holds is more than just circular reasoning. Felisa Smith, a professor in ecology and evolutionary biology, studies extinct mammals and applies this knowledge to the present. This book is a neatly crafted package that gives the reader all the required background knowledge, while its case studies make for fascinating reading. (Spoiler alert: packrat middens are my new favourite discovery.)

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Book review – The Contamination of the Earth: A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age

8-minute read

The Industrial Revolution has been a mixed blessing. Although it improved living standards and brought material prosperity to many, humanity and the environment have paid a high price, not least in the form of pollution. The Contamination of the Earth catalogues the many forms of past pollution but also examines the social and political aspects of it. In other words, how people were affected by it and responded to it, and how legislation and politics allowed it to happen, to persist, and to only grow with time. This sprawling and information-dense environmental history work does full justice to this large and serious topic, but be prepared for a read that is neither light nor uplifting.

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Book review – Life in the Cosmos: From Biosignatures to Technosignatures

8-minute read

Are we alone in the universe? For the moment, this question remains unanswered, though there are many ways to tackle it. Just how many was something I did not appreciate until I sunk my teeth into Harvard University Press’s new flagship astronomy title Life in the Cosmos. Written by astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam and theoretical physicist Abraham “Avi” Loeb, this is a book of truly colossal proportions, clocking in at over 1000 pages. It boldly goes where few academic books have gone before by seriously and open-mindedly considering the possibility of extraterrestrial technological intelligence on par with, or far beyond humans. I found myself gravitating towards this book on account of more than just its size.

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Book review – Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis

7-minute read

Writing a book about climate change is challenging due to the scale and many facets of the problem. With Our Biggest Experiment, climate campaigner, writer, and lecturer in science communication Alice Bell delivers a large book that tightly focuses on the history of both climate change research and our current fossil-fuel-dominated energy system. Driven largely by her curiosity about the people behind the data on climate change, this well-structured and easily readable book is full of remarkable stories. Bell excels in drawing your attention to the individual strands that make up the complex texture and weave of this huge history. As such, this is a highly recommended read for anyone interested in the backstory of how we arrived at our current predicament.

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Book review – Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice

8-minute read

Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen loom large over the history of Antarctic discovery. In their shadow, however, hides a lesser-known story. Some 70 years prior, three nations were locked in a race to discover what was at the South Pole. Professor of Environmental Humanities Gillen D’Arcy Wood here tells their story and sets it against a majestic backdrop: a deep-time history of how Antarctica became the icy wasteland it is now and shaped the Earth’s climate in the process. The clever twin story and electrifying prose of Land of Wondrous Cold caught me off-guard; I simply was not expecting this book to be this good.

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8-minute read

Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen loom large over the history of Antarctic discovery. In their shadow, however, hides a lesser-known story. Some 70 years prior, three nations were locked in a race to discover what was at the South Pole. Professor of Environmental Humanities Gillen D’Arcy Wood here tells their story and sets it against a majestic backdrop: a deep-time history of how Antarctica became the icy wasteland it is now and shaped the Earth’s climate in the process. The clever twin story and electrifying prose of Land of Wondrous Cold caught me off-guard; I simply was not expecting this book to be this good.

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Book review – The Empty Sea: The Future of the Blue Economy

7-minute read

By now, most people are aware of greenwashing; the marketing spin used by companies and organisations to convince you that their products and practices and environmentally friendly when in reality they are not. In The Empty Sea, physical chemist Ilaria Perissi joins forces with her colleague, self-styled “collapsologist” Ugo Bardi, to take a hard-nosed look at the blue economy. This is the collective term for economic activities related to the sea, and there is something decidedly fishy about its promises of prosperity and abundance.

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Book review – Life Changing: How Humans Are Altering Life on Earth

7-minute read

Ever since humans appeared on the scene, we have been altering life on Earth. Where once our actions could be considered part of nature’s fabric, our influence has become outsized and our options to exercise it have multiplied. Though the subtitle of Life Changing does not make it explicit, science writer Helen Pilcher focuses on our impact on the genetics and evolution of life around us. A book that stands out for its balanced tone, it managed to surprise me more than once, despite my familiarity with the topics considered.

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Book review – What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design

10-minute read

Advances in medical research mean we have come to grips with numerous diseases and health conditions over the decades. But, like a game of whack-a-mole, you solve one set of problems to only have other, often more complex problems take their place. There is valid criticism to be had of medicine and its reductionist approach and What Is Health? sees neurobiologist Peter Sterling offer a critique grounded in physiology.

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