High Tide: News from a Warming World - Tapa dura

‘With “High Tide”, Mark Lynas has given us a tremendous gift: he has time-travelled into our terrifying collective future, a future that has already arrived in the farthest reaches of the globe. Go with him on this breathtaking, beautifully told journey – to island nations being engulfed by rising tides, to towns swallowed by encroaching desert, to glaciers melting into oceans – and I promise that you will come back changed, determined to alter the course of history.’ Naomi Klein, author of ‘No Logo’

The ‘No Logo’ of climate change? – a book that shows how global warming is not something whose existence we should still debate, but something that has already happened, to many millions of people in a variety of ways, causing flooding, desertificaton, icemelt, erosion, drought and fires all across the world.

Climate change is no longer a concern for the future. It’s happening right now, and in this book the author takes us around the world to show that the impacts of global warming are already having a tangible effect on people’s lives. From houses being washed over by sand in China to the thawing of the Alaskan Arctic, the author witnesses some of the worst impacts of climate change at first hand. Some, like the floods in the UK, are near home. Others – like the drowning Pacific island of Tuvalu – are a world away from the car tailpipes and factory chimneys that are causing global warming in the first place. But this isn't simply an inventory of disaster, it's a wry look at how people around the globe are coping as the world they’ve always known changes at unprecedented speed. And in the process, the author has to eat whale blubber in Alaska, swim in shark-infested waters off the Great Barrier Reef and struggle to the top of Andean peaks in Peru.

Alongside the issue of the effects of rootless, lawless transnational capitalism, the already catastrophic man-made alterations to the global ecosystem will rise, like the oceans, to engulf all other issues worldwide in the coming decades. There is a new 21st century generation of activists being educated right now who will be their blithe, apolitical, party-animal predecessors' salvation. They have one bible already. This is the other one...

This, obviously, is an issue that is only going to be more and more present to more and more of us. And this is that issue’s indispensable book.