Some are not, like ski pro Michael “Bird” Shaffer who “speaks human, but everything else about him is bird,” including his use of avian puns like “kawfy” in his text messages.Ī couple of the colorful nonscientists stupefyingly seem not to believe in climate change.
Some are scientists, like Allie Balter, a Columbia University PhD who has studied what Antarctic ice was like millions of years ago. And in Greenland, he embarks on a week-long dogsled expedition up the island’s east coast, a journey that gets cut short by the pandemic shutdown of, well, everything.įox has assembled an entertaining cast of characters to help tell his tale, any of whom could carry a standalone profile. On the Juneau Icefield, he visits students taking teaspoon-sized samples of snow “on what seemed an infinite strata of ice.” In the Alps, he heads out on the 25-mile Sellaronda trail, which to be fair does have some rather swanky sounding rifugios, or mountain huts, complete with bartenders and menus featuring venison ragù. In the Cascades, he hikes into a “geological war zone” during a windstorm to help study the interaction between snowmelt and forest growth. Once there, Fox isn’t sitting in chalets sipping brandy in front of a fire either. He is not content to simply interview leading scientists in their labs, but instead follows them to where they work, which when you’re trying to document the end of winter means going to some very out of the way places, including the North Cascade Mountains, Alaskan glaciers, the Dolomites, and Greenland.
If the book were nothing more than a litany of doomsday data points, it would be important reading, though hard to recommend to any save masochists.īut Fox is a seriously terrific writer and an utterly madcap reporter, qualities that allow him to leaven the weighty with the whimsical, the threatening with the thrilling. There is a lot of gloomy research on display here: “The occurrence of large forest fires in the US West increased by 500 percent since the 1980s.” “The movement of nearly every glacier in the world is now synchronized - backward - as they melt at a historic rate.” “The Arctic has not been as warm as it is now in millions of years.” “Since 1990, the rate of sea level rise has nearly tripled.” And on and on. Fox has amassed a truly anxiety-inducing blizzard of data, at one point facetiously likening his book to a “flaming bag of apocalyptic dog feces.” And he’s not entirely wrong.
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