books & arts

Living through the storm

Hot: Living Vanity Fair, and having travelled the world
Through the for his earlier book, Earth Odyssey, on how
Next Fifty Years people are transforming their environment.
For Hot, he hits the road again, drawing
on Earth
on more than five years of travel to some of
by Mark Hertsgaard the places that are changing the most in the
world — both because of climate change and
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN rapid development. These are the world’s
HARCOURT: 2011. adaptation hotspots, where people will
352 PP. $25.00 probably need to adjust their lives the most
and the soonest — and where the direction
poorest people. The region experienced a
long drought in the 1980s, and even though
there is more rainfall now, it tends to come in
intense downpours according to Hertsgaard’s
main source, a Dutch environmental scientist
who has worked for decades on agriculture
in the region. By resurrecting a traditional
practice of encouraging trees to grow
alongside crops, villagers have managed
to rehabilitate “degraded savanna that was
on the verge of becoming a desert,” which

Y
ou’ve probably heard the old quip:
when a new idea appears, first it’s
ignored, then it’s denied and then
finally it’s accepted as common knowledge.
When it comes to climate change adaptation,
the climate community has already gone
through this process; having once regarded
the idea as taboo, it is now regarded as
important a response to climate change
as mitigation.
But for the general public, adaptation
is still little known and widely ignored.
Journalist Mark Hertsgaard hopes to change
that with his new book, Hot. Hertsgaard is
a veteran environmental reporter, writing
for diverse magazines including political
stalwart The Nation and fashion-conscious
ON OUR BOOKSHELF
of development today could have a big effect
on how well they adapt in coming decades.
He makes the obligatory pilgrimage to
Bangladesh — which has been dubbed
‘ground zero of climate change’ — to talk
about how this low-lying country, almost
entirely a delta, is under threat from rising
seas and the possibility of worsening
monsoon floods. He also checks in on the
grapevines of California wine country,
whose sensitive fruits are already showing
the strain of a changing climate.
But Hertsgaard also ventures far off
the beaten track of conventional climate
reporting. Trekking through northern
Mali in Africa’s parched Sahel he finds a
success story — all the more compelling as
it is home-grown from some of the world’s
Hertsgaard calls “a quiet green miracle.”
We have to work out ways
to adapt without relying on
being any more certain in
the future about potential
climate impacts.
This type of transformation will be crucial
for adapting to climate change, Hertsgaard
argues, because it is low-cost and helps
people to cope with change now as well as
preparing them for the future, regardless
of what that future holds. Throughout the
book, Hertsgaard stresses the importance
of such resilience. Rather than always
tackling problems head-on, there are other

America’s Climate Problem: The Way Forward
by Robert Repetto
EARTHSCAN: 2011. 176 PP. £17.99 / $29.95
America’s response to climate change is undoubtedly
of global importance. In this book, environmental
economist Robert Repetto maps out US national
policy to reduce emissions and aid a transition to
clean energy. In doing so, he outlines how to bring
resistant groups on board and promote international
cooperation while preserving economic growth and
high standards of living.
The Dance of Air & Sea: How Oceans, Weather,
& Life Link Together
by Arnold H. Taylor
OXFORD UNIV. PRESS: 2011. 256 PP. £16.99
Air and water have an intricate relationship
that shapes our environment and life on Earth.
This book illustrates the complexity of the Earth
system, weaving in anecdotes of some of the
characters who have helped us to fathom these
almost unimaginably huge and complex relations.
ways of dealing with adversity — such
as countering dwindling water supplies
through eco‑agricultural practices that help
retain soil moisture, rather than increasing
reservoir storage, he points out.
However, while emphasizing uncertainty
about the future helps bolster Hertsgaard’s
argument about the need for resilience, he
tends to skip over the great uncertainty in
climate projections, such as rainfall. He often
cites studies of estimated impacts as if they
were fact, rather than an attempt to peer far
into the future through cloudy binoculars.
Hertsgaard also seems at times to blame
too much on climate change, downplaying
the other factors involved. This ‘glossing
over’ of complex topics may annoy experts,
but is to some degree inevitable in a popular
book such as this.
When discussing uncertainty about
sea-level rise, one local government official
tells Hertsgaard that “the climate science
of 2020 will know more than we know
today.” We may know more in a decade, but
it is not clear that will actually narrow the
uncertainty much, as often what we learn

16 NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | VOL 1 | APRIL 2011 | www.nature.com/natureclimatechange

© 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved


is how poorly we understood things before.
It seems, instead, we have to work out
ways to adapt without relying on being any
more certain in the future about potential
climate impacts.
The most valuable aspect of this book
is perhaps the emphasis on the social side
of adaptation. Hertsgaard points out that
the Netherlands’ success at planning for
climate change shows that “social context
matters more than technological prowess.”
The country is certainly well-off, but they
also have a long history of collective water
management and working together to cope
with floods. The Dutch are abandoning
some land to allow space for the rivers to
flood in a controlled manner, and although
the farmers that use that land now aren’t
happy about giving it up, it doesn’t seem to
be a deal breaker. In the US, on the other
Playing with the planet
It’s 2070 and millions are
VIDEO GAME
dying from starvation —
not just in Africa, but in
North America too. I have
long stopped caring that
several species, including
the orangutan, have become
extinct. But if I can get
everyone in China to switch
to vegetarianism and third-
generation biofuels, there
may yet be hope for the planet.
Such is the scene halfway through my
first play of Fate of the World, a new video
game that aims to bring the political and
environmental struggles of climate change
to life. Available for purchase online from
Red Redemption — a small UK-based
company aiming to make socially relevant
games backed by real science — Fate of the
World scores points for tackling a tricky
subject and making it look beautiful. It isn’t
the sort of game likely to addict players —
unless you’re a PhD student who fancies
trying to reverse-engineer the rules of the
game, such as those that determine when
exactly the orangutan goes extinct. But
it could make a useful teaching tool for
higher-level studies, or provide a good
talking point for those trying to scope
the boundaries of the real climate change
problem and explore tractable ways of
solving it.
The game begins with a starter mission
of bringing prosperity to Africa by 2120,
after which you can attempt to keep
global warming below 3 °C by 2200, or,
NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | VOL 1 | APRIL 2011 | www.nature.com/natureclimatechange 17
hand, “retreat-with-compensation is a
much harder sell,” Hertsgaard argues.
These kinds of local situations are easy to
overlook when taking a broader view of how
well the world might adapt to climate change.
Hertsgaard’s on-the-ground reporting
highlights how we are more vulnerable than
we might think, and how adaptation will
probably be harder than we expect. Before
visiting China, for example, Hertsgaard reads
a report from the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development that states
that Shanghai’s flood defences are “among the
best in the world.” But he wanders around
the city and sees that while the old city has
high defences, the new, fast-growing business
district of Pudong has only “puny dikes”
between it and the river. China — along with
much of the world — is growing faster than
its defences.
Your first mission, should you choose to accept it: Fate of the World challenges players to bring
prosperity to Africa.
controversially, let loose as ‘Dr Apocalypse’
and see just how bad things can get. As the
head of the fictional Global Environment
Organization (GEO), you have a budget to
employ agents in different world regions
and task them with promoting projects,
ranging from encouraging a switch to
electric cars to opening a regional aid
office. Once projects have been paid for, the
game advances five years and you see the
outcome in terms of regional greenhouse-
gas emissions, population, political support
for your GEO presidency and more. This
© 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
books & arts
In China, and many other places
around the world, Hertsgaard was
frustrated to find many people who were
not concerned about climate change,
doubting whether it is really happening
or really a threat. And as one expert tells
him, “you can’t adapt to a problem that
you don’t think exists.” Hot should help
make it harder for the public to ignore
or deny climate change and the need to
adapt. Soon, perhaps, it will be regarded as
common sense — and then the world can
get started with the hard work of adapting
on the vast scale that is needed. ❐
REVIEWED BY MASON INMAN
Mason Inman is a freelance science writer based in
California, USA.
Published online: 13 March 2011
© RED REDEMPTION
continues until you reach the target year or
fail at your mission, whichever comes first.
The origin of Fate of the World lies in
a drunken boast. When game designer
Gobion Rowlands was invited for a
college dinner at Oxford University with
his wife, environmental change and
management student Hannah Rowlands,
and her supervisor climate researcher
Myles Allen, Gobion claimed he could
make a compelling game out of anything.
“They feed you a lot of wine — a lot,”
he says by way of explanation. Allen