Title: Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
Author: Mark Hertsgaard
ISBN: 9780618826124
Pages: 352
Release date: January 2011
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Genre: Nonfiction; environmental science
Format: eBook
Source: Personal collection & Netgalley
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

In Hot, Mark Hertsgaard approaches global warming through the prism of a parent concerned about the world his little girl will inhabit by 2050. A disappointed Melody Wilson hoped to read more solid advice.

In 2005, American author and journalist Mark Hertsgaard met with David King, then the British government’s top climate adviser, who told him that anthropogenic climate change (that caused by human activity) had already arrived–100 years ahead of schedule. Hertsgaard, a new father at the time, realised the implications: even if we were to halt greenhouse-gas emissions immediately, the planet was already locked into at least 25 more years of rising temperatures, making the world his newborn daughter would inhabit a very different place.

By situating Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth in the context of fatherhood, Hertsgaard attempts to stress the urgency and immediacy of a climate-change crisis that many see as a far-off–and therefore unimaginable–threat.

Continue reading this review at chinadialogue…