review by Brian Charles Clark
With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
Fred Pearce
Beacon Press, 2007
Cloth, $16.47
Buying a Prius and locally grown foods may convince you that you’re reducing your carbon footprint, but for Fred Pearce in With Speed and Violence, the damage may already be done. The planet’s carbon load is high enough that we may already be careening towards a tipping point, a moment when the climate changes suddenly, “with speed and violence.” Any way it goes is bad for humans (biology is fragile, and culture especially so), but hot looks especially pernicious.
Pearce is a self-described climate-change skeptic. He’s not a naysayer. To the contrary and while remaining skeptical, Pearce thinks the mainstream of climate science may not go far enough. So he’s kindly assembled a menagerie of horrors which, perversely, make for fascinating reading. Read the rest of this entry »