Think Globally. Act Now.

• Author: Stockwell, Norman
• Position: BOOKS - Fire and Flood: A People's History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present; Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice

"Let's start at the very beginning / A very good place to start," sings Julie Andrews as she instructs the von Trapp children in the 1965 film The Sound of Music. Two new books on climate change take up this call in a powerful and useful way, providing some "big picture" insights not often gleaned from the wealth of current writing on the topic.

Eugene Linden is an author and journalist who has written on climate issues for more than three decades. His new book, Fire and Flood: A People's History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present, takes a deep dive into the history of how we got to this point, and where we could go from here.

He notes that the issue of increased carbon dioxide causing a rise in global temperatures was first really brought to the attention of the U.S. government under President Jimmy Carter in 1979, with the publication of the Charney Report from an ad hoc committee of the National Academy of Sciences. "Now, a real dawn of climate action finally seems at hand," he writes in the books introduction. "[T]hings are changing fast. Not as fast, alas, as the climate itself."

Linden views the climate crisis with four parallel clocks, all starting in 1979 but each running at different speeds, and sometimes even in reverse. These clocks represent "the interaction of four different realms: reality, the scientific world, public opinion, and the world of business and finance." He notes that the last three are "all lagging the reality of climate change, but to different degrees."

Using this lens, Linden leads us through the decades up to the present, highlighting the many times when "nations dithered on any actions to avert the threat." While some of this failure is related to science needing to develop the tools to measure, monitor, and model the systems, some of it has been malicious. He recalls the efforts of the chemical company DuPont to delay the regulation of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, refrigerant chemicals that created a hole in the ozone layer in the 1970s and 1980s.

"As it turned out," Linden reflects, "a threat to life on Earth was less of a concern for DuPont s C-suite than a threat to quarterly profits." The corporate efforts to block or delay the regulation of these chemicals in the 1980s were instrumental in the 1990s and early 2000s in building the tools and tactics for blocking action on climate change.

Linden, speaking of the years under President George W. Bush, says, "Incalculable damage was done by having...