Articles

Thane Gustafson, Klimat:  Russia in the Age of Climate Change (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2021).  321 pages.  Maps.      If you are travelling to Russia anytime soon (and I realize that you most likely are not), do not expect to see houses with solar panels on their roofs in the cities or electric cars on the roads.  Russia has very few of either.  Most people live in apartment blocks and there are few intercity roads for cars or trucks to travel on.  Trains are standard… Read More »Mark Neely’s Review of Klimat by Thane Gustafson

A review of Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters:  How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History (New York:  Penguin, 2020), 397 pp., maps, photos.      This sweeping history of India from the nineteenth century to the present focuses necessarily on agriculture, climate, and engineering.  Unlike the United States, where agriculture has not been dominant for a century, agriculture “employs 60 percent of India’s population,” and India’s “population will continue to be predominantly rural by the mid-twenty-first century” (p. 14).  Therefore, climate matters less in… Read More »Review of Unruly Waters by Sunil Amrith

A Review of Eugene Linden, Fire and Flood:  A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present (New York:  Penguin Press, 2022)      Eugene Linden’s Fire and Flood is a history of the problem of climate change over the last forty-odd years– must reading for members of CCL.  Linden captures the essence of developments decade by decade, the eighties, the nineties, and so forth, from four standpoints:  the reality of climate changes in the period, the scientists’ increasing understanding of them, public opinion… Read More »Review of Fire and Flood

Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works:  A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future (New York:  Viking, 2022), 326 pp.     Vaclav Smil, a member of the geography department at the University of Manitoba, in this well organized and clearly written book, argues that globalization and what he calls “the four material pillars of modern civilization,” plastics, steel, concrete, and ammonia, are central to understanding the problem of climate change.  The problem, simply put, is that all of them are carbon intensive.     … Read More »Review of Vaclav Smil book by Mark Neely