High Tide. News from a warmer world

[Simon]

You, me and everybody else’s life is about to change and have an effect on us in a near future because of global warming, even if you don’t care about it. What we will see is drastic drought or floods, a higher risk of bigger and more powerful storms, changed climate zones that will change whole ecosystems or destroy them. It is a massive global change that Mark Lynas is trying to describe about in this book High Tide. And he manages to do that in a very personal and readable way.

High Tide never gets boring or monotonously like all the other fact books easily can turn out to be when they begin to pile lot’s and lot’s of numbers and tables to describe the subject. No, High Tide is extremely exciting and in some parts of the book really scary. This is probably because Mark Lynas is a journalist so he knows how to write stuff to get people’s attention. Instead of writing up a lot of boring sheets and numbers (You know, generally boring information) in the book he takes you on a journey around the world to let you as a reader meet the people and their environments that is drastically changing because of global warming.

Lynas begins his journey in Great Britain who hasn’t experienced a real winter in ages. Instead of snow and real winter weather they get more and more rain, floods and mountains that transforms to muddy and lethal avalanches. Several tree kinds and animal species will disappear because it will be to hot for them to live where they normally lived before.

After Great Britain Lynas takes you to Antarctic where the frost in the ground is melting and causes huge consequences for the communities’ infrastructure and everyone who lives there.

You also get to meet people from the island paradise of Tuvalu who will be the first country in the world to disappear because of global warming. The islands will soon be flooded by the ocean and disappear because the ocean deep is rising every day because of the greenhouse effect.

You will then follow Lynas hunt for storms and hurricanes in the southern parts of America. Lynas also meets several scientists and hurricane hunters that warn that America will face more and stronger hurricanes in the future (Just what is happening today!).

But it’s not over yet. Lynas also take you on a journey to China were the drought and sandstorms is spreading more and more and swallows whole villages, cities, rivers and lakes. This is something that you won’t see in the news but is a really big problem in China.

The final place Lynas takes you to is to the mountains in Peru where the glaciers is melting away. In Peru, Lynas tries to find a big glacier that his dad photographed in the 1980’s. But in the end he finds out that the glacier has completely melted and disappeared.

But in all this Lynas skilfully succeeds to mix in real facts and science reports about climate change. He also let’s critics say their meaning in the book. All of this makes the book seem trustworthy and not exaggerated. In the end of the book Lynas talks about how we can make the consequences of global warming less tough. Because we can’t stop the global warming anymore, we can only prepare for a tougher life as best as we can.

The language in the book is modern and is extremely alive and is very easy to read in a smooth way. The well-written descriptions about the different environments Lynas experiences never end. Lynas manage to make High Tide extremely exciting but nonetheless full of information and facts. Every page you read takes you one step closer to the judgement day.

“High Tide. News from a warmer world” is a great book that I can really recommend to people who is the slightest interested about what is happening to our world.

http://www.marklynas.org/2004/3/19/high-tide