The End of Ice

Don't be fooled by my relatively well-meaning score and the title; this is the most boring kind of climate change book: the one about capital-C Climate Change in general. It's for the most part not about ice and the role it plays on our planet and its warming. And it's not about the author's relationship with ice, specifically, either. Did you know that climate change is real and man-made? Yes? Thought so. But that's already most of what you will learn here. Education is not the issue.

The way I see it, there are only two kinds of books in this space that are interesting:

1. Books about a specific place, concept, or thing (like ice). It's one thing to say “since year x, the world has lost y percent of its coral reefs” and then go on and list a bunch of benefits that reefs have for the oceans. It's an entirely different one to spend a whole book with that reef, really getting to know it, and consequently feel a bit of what it means to lose it. The hard thing here is to find a language with which to talk about these places. It will most likely be more like poetry than journalistic writing. An example of this kind of nature writing that had a lasting impact on me would be “The Living Mountain” by Nan Shepherd. A book where she tries to capture the Cairngorm mountains and what they mean to her in prose.
2. Books that go deep on the effects, interdependencies, adaptations, and solutions that are involved. Basically, ecology. Here, journalistic writing does work. But it's not enough to skim the surface. Most of the time, the book either skips the interesting part (why something is having a certain effect) or pulls back too soon, only to then jump to a completely different topic halfway across the globe. An example of a book that did this really well in my opinion is “Deutschland 2050”, where Nick Reimer goes deep into the concrete effects climate change will have on Germany.

The best part was, frankly, the ending. Here, Jamail goes full-on climate realist; a thing we, as humanity, should do far more often. In some respects, climate change is a battle we have already lost. So now come two next steps: living with the damage we have already done, and mitigating any that would be even more devastating. Discourse tends to ignore, even punish, the former. Jamail comes at it from an angle of grief. That's certainly a way to do it, even if it's not the one I would choose. I wish he would have gone into that aspect of his relationship to climate change more deeply, instead of listing yet another study we already know. But ultimately, he seems to be of the impression that the issue is simply that nobody is believing these “radical” climate scientists. And if only people would see that they are right, they–we–would change our ways. I think it would be nice if it were this easy.