Victims of the carbon lobby.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth - Book review

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

By Mark Hertsgaard

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

339 pages. $25.

A couple months ago, I, picked up Mark Hertsgaards latest book, Hot, and read several pages of it, only to put it down because I found it cloying. He opens and closes the book by making extensive references to his young daughter, and how the fact of becoming a father made him viscerally aware of the risks that global warming posed to her and her generation.

"My daughter and her peers around the world were now at grave risk," he writes in the prologue. "As a father, I rebelled at what all this implied for my little Chiara's future. So ... I made a silent vow: to find a way, if one existed, for Chiara and her generation to survive the challenges ahead."

OK, call me a cynic, a curmudgeon, or a churl, but this set-up bugs me. First of all, Hertsgaard's daughter is going to have so many advantages over little girls in Bangladesh that to put them in the same category is a bit of a stretch. And secondly, did Hertsgaard really need to become a father to lay out the challenges we all face as the climate goes to hell?

But I returned to Hot and gave it another shake.

I did so because the topic of global warming is so crucial that we can't devote enough attention to ir in the pages of The Progressive.

And I also did so because I admire the great journalism that Hertsgaard has done over the last three decades exposing the nuclear energy industry (Nuclear, Inc.), skewering the mainstream media for fawning over Ronald Reagan (On Bended Knee), and highlighting environmental destruction around the world (Earth Odyssey).

I'm glad I picked this book up again because there's a lot of valuable information in here.

Like Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, Hertsgaard lays out the problem clearly. The temperature on Earth has been rising rapidly over the last century, and even if everyone on Earth stopped using fossil fuels today, "the climate system's inertia would keep temperatures rising ... for thirty to forty years."

That's not encouraging, to say the least.

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Neither is the fact that some of the disastrous aspects of global warming have appeared much sooner than scientists predicted even fifteen years ago. They aren't coming in the year 2100; they are here now.

"Climate change had arrived a century sooner than expected, and future generations were no longer the only victims," he writes.

As a result, he says, we should expect...