Skip to main content

Images from a Warming Planet - Ashley Cooper ****

I'm not a big fan of coffee table books - and this is certainly big and heavy enough to make a coffee table from if you attached legs (I certainly wouldn't fancy reading it in bed) - but Ashley Cooper's 495 photographs covering the impact of climate change, fossil fuel energy generation and renewables are absolutely stunning - crisp, large scale, extremely colourful and putting across a message that is sometimes hard to convey in words. Whether Cooper is showing oil refineries and damaged landscapes or homes battered by storms and decaying after drought, these are dramatic images.

In his foreword, Jonathon Porritt says 'do not allow the power of the images come between you and the people' - emphasising that it's not enough to record what's happening, but rather we should this kind of thing as a call to arms. My only concern here is that there's an awful lot of 'isn't this terrible' scenes and some nice images of the small scale 'good stuff' - but not enough suggestive of how we get from here to there. For example, there's a section on renewables which has a number of visually striking wind farms, but not much in the way of the more important solar farms - and no mention of the huge need to develop better storage (which often feels a bit too hard-tech to be truly green) because most renewables are not consistent in their output.

From a scientific viewpoint, I would have liked to have seen more restraint in the assumptions of causality. We are presented with the impact of storms, for example, as if they are definitively the result of climate change. Scientists would always temper the assertion, because there have always been devastating storms. We can say with a high probability that storms are more frequent as a result of climate change, but we can't say that a particular storm was caused by it. There's also an amusing little scientific contradiction on a page that comments about Iceland getting 30% of its energy from geothermal and also carries a picture of the Sun saying 'Ultimately all the Earth's energy comes from the Sun' - it certainly mostly does, but there are exceptions, notably nuclear (which only gets a passing dismissal later on) and geothermal.

So there may be rather too much of an 'isn't this terrible' message accompanied by over-simplistic solutions - but this shouldn't get in the way of these stunning images and the job I hope they can do in persuading some of the undecided on climate change. If the pictures get the message that we need to do something across to their viewership (somehow, readership doesn't work) and they then look elsewhere for those solutions, then at least the images are doing their job. And despite Mr Porritt's concerns, I don't think we should underplay the power of the photography. It's a great book visually and I'm delighted to have had a chance to get a good look at it.

The best place to get the book is the author's website: www.imagesfromawarmingplanet.net

 Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more