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Field Notes from a Catastrophe
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Didactic and preachy... and I agree with her
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The Sixth Extinction
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A major audiobook about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes. Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
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The Uninhabitable Earth
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- Narrated by: David Wallace-Wells
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- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.
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Don’t read if you have depressive tendencies.
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Falter
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Overall
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Thirty years ago, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now, he broadens the warning: The entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.
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Tough words for a tough time.
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Outstanding Overview
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The Water Will Come
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What if Atlantis wasn't a myth but an early precursor to a new age of great flooding? Across the globe, scientists and civilians alike are noticing rapidly rising sea levels and higher and higher tides pushing more water directly into the places we live, from our most vibrant, historic cities to our last remaining traditional coastal villages. With each crack in the great ice sheets of the Arctic and Antarctica and each tick upward of Earth's thermometer, we are moving closer to the brink of broad disaster.
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Very interesting
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This Changes Everything
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In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.
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Didactic and preachy... and I agree with her
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Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
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Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or al-Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought - the shock and awe of global warming. Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter.
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Grief Counseling for Civilization
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Extinction Rebellion are inspiring a whole generation to take action on climate breakdown. Now you can become part of the movement - and together, we can make history. It's time. This is our last chance to do anything about the global climate and ecological emergency. Our last chance to save the world as we know it. Now or never, we need to be radical. We need to rise up. And we need to rebel.
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Heart Wrenching and Motivating
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The Ends of the World
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Our world has ended five times: It has been broiled, frozen, poison gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth's past dead ends, and in the process offers us a glimpse of our possible future. Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the 21st century have analogs in these five extinctions.
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A Kid's Science Book FOR ADULTS!!
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In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here - some are well known; some you may have never heard of.
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Well researched and explained, but tedious
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Number one international and New York Times best-selling author Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, makes the case for a Green New Deal - explaining how bold climate action can be a blueprint for a just and thriving society.
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Another excellent thought provoking book by Naomi Klein
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All Hell Breaking Loose
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The Pentagon, unsentimental and politically conservative, might not seem likely to be worried about climate change - still linked, for many people, with polar bears and coral reefs. Yet, of all the major institutions in American society, none take climate change as seriously as the US military. Drawing on previously obscure reports and government documents, renowned security expert Michael Klare shows that the US military sees the climate threat as imperiling the country on several fronts at once.
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Our biggest danger
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The End of Nature
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Reissued on the 10th anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the Earth. This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever.
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On the Future
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Humanity has reached a critical moment. Our world is unsettled and rapidly changing, and we face existential risks over the next century. Various outcomes - good and bad - are possible. Yet our approach to the future is characterized by short-term thinking, polarizing debates, alarmist rhetoric, and pessimism. In this short, exhilarating book, renowned scientist and best-selling author Martin Rees argues that humanity’s prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow.
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Science, the future, and great wisdom
- By Philomath on 10-29-18
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Timefulness
- How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
- By: Marcia Bjornerud
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth's deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future.
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The narration was so bad I put it aside
- By 11104 on 10-13-18
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Climate Change
- What Everyone Needs to Know
- By: Joseph Romm
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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From Joseph Romm, Chief Science Advisor for National Geographic's Years of Living Dangerously series and one of Rolling Stone's "100 people who are changing America," Climate Change offers user-friendly, scientifically rigorous answers to the most difficult (and commonly politicized) questions surrounding what climatologist Lonnie Thompson has deemed "a clear and present danger to civilization."
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Informative and thorough. A must read
- By Stanislav Dakhe on 09-23-18
Publisher's Summary
Taking listeners from the melting Alaskan permafrost to storm-torn New Orleans, acclaimed journalist Elizabeth Kolbert approaches this monumental problem from every angle. She interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science, draws frightening parallels to lost civilizations, and presents the moving tales of people who are watching their worlds disappear. Growing out of an award-winning three-part series for The New Yorker, Field Notes from a Catastrophe brings the environment into the consciousness of the American people and asks what, if anything, can be done to save our planet.
Critic Reviews
"Powerful, clear, and important." (Scientific American)
"Kolbert's calmly persuasive reporting stands out for its sobering clarity....Kolbert lets facts rather than polemics tell the story....This unbiased overview is a model for writing about an urgent environmental crisis." (Publishers Weekly)
"Illuminating and sobering....Includes fascinating accounts of how climate changes affected the planet in the past, and how such changes are occurring in different parts of the world right now." (The New York Review of Books)
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Danny J. Lesandrini
- Tucson, AZ
- 04-21-06
Very well done!
I came to the subject of Global Warming with only a vague concern, and very little bias. Sure, my wife and I each drive a Prius and we recycle, but before reading this book I wasn't really <b><i>worried</i></b>. Now, I'm keeping watch for ways to be part of the solution.
The book is well written with an easy style. The author weaves scientific elements into the story of human life, making the listen both interesting and informative. While I found the middle of the book to drag a bit, the last chapters more than made up for any necessary foundation laid therein.
Thank you, Elizabeth Kolbert, for your clear and scientific explanation of the facts that fuel the fears of global warming. I wish everyone would read this book!
12 of 13 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Jackie
- Edwards, CO, USA
- 04-28-06
One Scary Book
This has to be the scariest book I have ever listened to. In her calm, state the facts way, she step by step teaches how the planet is changing at an unprecedented rate and how the US is lagging far behind in taking action. Riveting book well worth the time to listen to.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful
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- Andy
- Westport, CT, United States
- 06-23-06
just the facts
Great distillation of what exactly "global warming" is. In only a few hours, the book provides solid info on the past, present and future implications of global warming. Beyond the info, I thought the narrator was one of the best I've ever heard at Audible.
9 of 11 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- roryski
- 02-27-11
A must read for everyone!
The author knows how to write and to convey information without patronizing the audience - she is about information (draw your own conclusions). The book also does not fall into the statistics trap.
Without hesitation an excellent (albeit frightning) resource on climate change and it's consequences.
Reader is also perfectly suited.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful
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Overall
- Marian Hanganu
- Ploiesti, Romania
- 05-04-08
Scary
Listen the book if you really want to know how far are we to a catastrophy. You will be scared. Read with a grave voice, the book presents undenialble proofs that we are close to World's greatest catastrophy.
I also recommend "the Coming Economic Collapse" by Stephen Leeb.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful
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- Morgan German
- 12-19-18
Missing Part III
A whole chunk of the book is missing in the audible version. I don’t know why.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
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- Gretchen SLP
- Sacramento, California
- 02-12-16
Citizens of Planet Earth, Unite!
I began listening to this book only because I felt I had a responsibility to know the truth, as a human being, as a parent of human beings, and as a care provider for human beings in a medical setting. What I did NOT expect was that I would find it so riveting that I would want to listen to it all in one sitting. This is a clear, concise, lively, user-friendly and eminently readable book. It combines science, history, and social studies in one thoroughly engaging volume that will leave you eager to learn more about what each of us can and must do to promote positive change and avert disaster not just for future generations, but for our children and indeed, for ourselves. The chapters on The Golden Toad, The Curse of Akkad, and Floating Houses alone are worth the price of admission. I downloaded the print version of the updated (2015) edition of the book also, just to see what new conclusions have been reached since Kolbert published the first edition a decade ago.
Special kudos to Hope Davis (one of my favorite actresses and easily one of the top five narrators on Audible) for the superlative narration of this terrifying and yet hopeful modern classic.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful
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- R.S.
- Saint-Laurent, Quebec, Canada
- 07-18-11
Concise look at global warming & policy responses
This collection of articles about global warming, those who have been involved in the development of the science, the discoveries of scientists tracing its terrifying trajectory, and US policy in the Bush administration is a model of concision. And it is still, unfortunately, timely. "Field Notes" concludes with hopeful examples of the possibilities of awareness and change.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful
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- Montaque
- 04-29-15
listener friendly facts.
Narrator was good.
Story told left a lasting imprint on cc effects.
I now feel I have a better understanding of how cc is observed by multiple disciplines of science.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful
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- Superfan
- 02-04-17
Probably better as a physical book
Contains a lot of facts but little story. Therefore, it makes kind of a boring audiobook. I'm pretty sure I would like it better if I could see the words on a page rather than listening to it as I commute to work.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful