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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more