Taking the Climate’s Pulse

Want to know the facts about global climate change? Don’t listen to the pundits on television or search online for the endless and often uninformed blogs on the subject. Instead, pick up a book by an expert, such as The Rough Guide to Climate Change (Rough Guides, 2006), by Robert Henson ’81.

Happily for the reader, Henson is both a meteorologist and a journalist. He works for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research. There, he writes and edits publications on weather and weather research and participates in research projects. He also is the author of The Rough Guide to Weather (Rough Guides, 2002), a fine compendium of information on weather and its patterns.

In his new book, Henson concentrates not on weather specifics but on general climactic patterns and how and why they are changing. Although the author recognizes global climate change as an established fact, the book eschews the combative writing style of many writers on the subject, taking instead a balanced and highly informed approach. His purpose may be to convince, but his method is to present facts and let those facts illuminate his arguments.

The first fact he mentions is that the Earth has, indeed, warmed by close to 0.8°C (1.4°F) in the last century. “In recent years,” he writes, “global temperatures have spiked dramatically, reaching a new high in 1998. An intense El Niño early that year clearly played a role in the astounding warmth, but things haven’t exactly chilled down since then. The first five years of the twenty-first century, along with 1998, were the hottest on record—and quite possibly warmer than any others in the past millennium.”

The reasons for the increasing warmth are complex, and Henson does them justice by examining potential natural as well as human causes and the ways natural elements, such as rainforests and volcanic eruptions, affect climate and the weather patterns that result from climate change. Many of the outcomes of a warming climate are well known: extreme heat, violent weather, flooding and drought, and melting polar ice and rising sea levels, but Henson also explores the effects on ecosystems and agriculture and on the quality of human habitats.

The book is well organized, beginning, in part one, with a primer on the basic mechanisms of global climate and the ways in which they, and other factors, interact to cause climate change. Part two functions somewhat like the forensic evidence presented during a court case, providing an in-depth look at how climate change already is affecting life on Earth. Part three delves into the science that has enabled researchers to gauge climate change and puts current discoveries and theories into historical context. The fourth part—easily one of the most topical—examines the debates surrounding the issue and discusses possible solutions that might, if not eliminate the threats posed by global climate change, then at least reduce them. The final section presents a list of other sources on the subject, such as books and websites.

Interesting and well written, The Rough Guide to Climate Change should easily hold the attention of anyone curious or concerned about this important topic.

—Christopher Dow