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The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and-finally-the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment-the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies-failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization. In this haunting, provocative work of science-based fiction, Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway imagine a world devastated by climate change. Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called "carbon combustion complex" that have turned the practice of science into political fodder. Based on sound scholarship and yet unafraid to speak boldly, this book provides a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate change literature.… (more)
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century, caused by global warming and pollution. It purports to recount the disaster with perspective that
usually only time can provide. We today are too closely involved to see the forest for the
usually the case. Yet most of can see the forest, burning, and that is a different issue the book delves
into with gusto. Science has been shunted aside in favor of "freedom" and the dollar.
The basic premise of a historian looking back to see what happened is valid, but the authors don't go nearly
far enough. The rank stupidity shown by the politicians of the 20th century is no different from the rank
stupidity of the church in the thousand years before, when it burned scientists at the stake for uttering
facts it did not want to hear, regardless of provability. Basically, it was always this way. There have
always been entrenched interests to defend, empires to defend, wealth to defend, and of course power to
expand. Our author from the future missed that.
It is instructive to see how a future Chinese academic might view the economic history of the west, citing
capitalism vs communism and neoliberalism and market fundamentalism (in the religious fervor sense). But
that academic would surely have also discovered and reported the simple truism that separates all of it for
the purposes of his report: Communism failed because it did not tell the economic truth about prices.
Capitalism failed because it did not tell the ecological truth about prices. That in a nutshell has driven
the greed machine to the heights we see today. (It is touched on in the glossary.) The greater good is a
concept discredited in the USA, and the result is a planet swamped for example, in 88,000 new chemical
compounds since WWII, only three of which have been tested. (This is touched on in the Q&A, where they
compare the lack of chemical testing to exhaustive testing in pharmaceuticals.) Government went from being
the solution in the trustbuster age, to the problem in the Reagan era. The results were predictable and were
predicted. The market fundamentalists just told everyone where they could go. And we are. Faster than we
thought.
The "report" is only about 60 pages. More of a pamphlet than a book. There follows a lexicon of terms we in
the present currently use and abuse. This also helps give perspective, as does the Q&A with the authors that
follows. The combination of those three nonstandard components makes this an unusual book that would be
refreshing if it weren't so hurtful.