| 1st October, 2027 | Non-fiction | Environmental Science; Climate
As the world warms, the same processes that produced the ice ages are running in reverse, involving feedback loops connecting the tundra to the air, the air to the oceans, and the oceans to the ice sheets. Feedbacks are the reason seemingly trivial everyday actions— driving, flying, eating a burger— will produce an unrecognizable world.
On Ice tells the story of the ice ages, weaving natural history and the history of science with contemporary, cutting-edge research. Building each chapter around a particular glacier, Kolbert will reveal tales of treachery and, on occasion, acts of heroism by the vivid characters who drove science forward. First charting the fundamentals of climate change, the book will then look to the future, to the world’s last remaining ice sheets.
We’ve been warned that when it comes to climate change our actions will be decisive. But the truth— the really inconvenient truth— is this is only half true. Earth’s systems operate according to their own inhuman logic. Everything that’s been learned about our planet’s history suggests that change, when it comes, is self-reinforcing and, as a consequence, violent. The changes we have set in motion may soon— and perhaps already have— run beyond our control.
Elizabeth Kolbert is the bestselling author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, and Under a White Sky, which was named a top ten book of the year by The Washington Post. For her work at The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
US: Crown
Spain: Debate/PRH
UK: Bodley Head