Books of The Times - ‘The Weather of the Future’ and ‘The Climate War’ - NYTimes.com

Excerpt from a timely book review

“In their least guarded moments,” Mr. Pooley writes, “the climate campaigners would tell you what they had always known in their bones: their work was necessary but not sufficient. Climate action was going to happen sooner or later, but they couldn’t make it happen. It might be inevitable — the true believers still believed it was — but it would only become real when enough people demanded it and shouted down the lobbyists and the professional deniers and demanded it again. Alexis de Tocqueville long ago said that in the United States, events ‘can move from the impossible to the inevitable without ever stopping at the probable.’ Was that still true? How bad did things need to get before the moment came? Would the prospect of a clean-energy economy, and the jobs it would bring, mobilize enough people to make a difference? Or would some sort of monstrous, galvanic weather event — epic heat and drought, Katrina on steroids — be needed to shake America fully awake?”

Books of The Times - ‘The Weather of the Future’ and ‘The Climate War’ - NYTimes.com