Confronting Climate Change

Risks, Implications and Responses

By Irving M. Mintzer (editor)

Cambridge Univ. Press
Publication Date: June 1992
Pages: 382 pages
ISBN: 0521421098
         
         

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Irving Mintzer and Amber Leonard had turned a room of their small house outside Washington, DC, into the book room. I flew there from my home in Ohio several times in 1992, for what seemed like an endless battle with effluvia -- the paper kind. Irving's approach to book editing, he freely admitted, was to throw all the manuscripts into a big pile in the corner and sift through that pile whenever he needed something. (I've emulated that approach myself on occasion.) The task was enormous: To gather expert science from around the world to make a case that Climate Change was underway, to look dispassionately at the political and social undercurrents (as well as the Gulf Stream current) and to consider the various means -- technological, political, and corporate -- that the leaders of the world might effectively respond.

This was the first time since Whole Earth that I had worked on a science-oriented volume, in which I was translating the ideas of science into, say, ninth-grade-reading-level English. Most of my work focused on this sort of hands-on editing, and on creating some of the charts and diagrams. It was a wonderful project. I deeply enjuoyed the conversations I had with the contributors to the book. And I would like to think it made a contribution to the policy-makers' understanding. At the time, it seemed like an outrageous assertion in many quarters -- that whether or not global climate change was "provable" as imminent, it made sense to take prudent measures to reduce fossil fuel use and to prepare for the potential effects. Today, that seems simply like conventional wisdom (except perhaps in the US Capitol).