Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid - Thor Hanson ****

There have been many books on climate change, but Thor Hanson's quirkily titled contribution takes quite a different tack - it's about the impact climate change has on species and how they respond through moving, adapting, evolving or clinging on to a remnant of their original habitat.

This could have been a dull and worthy catalogue of doom, but Hanson's personal and chatty approach gives us a more balanced insight - sometimes it's a relatively good news story, though there is no doubt that remarkably small changes in climate can have a noticeable effect on the local flora and fauna, and in some cases, with nowhere to go and limited ability to adapt. this will lead to species being wiped out. 

The impact of climate change is illustrated through a whole host of different species. We meet marmot-like pikas and Joshua trees, dovekies and anole lizards (the 'hurricane lizards' of the title, which feature in a bizarre experiment involving a leaf blower to test how they cope with different wind strengths) and even strange locations that are able to maintain a colder climate than their surroundings, producing pockets of flora and fauna that haven't moved in response to a temperature rise.

Along the way there are plenty of personal stories, from fishing trips to experiments with his son on the impact of carbon dioxide, plus a couple of particularly impressive examples of situations where a scientist has set out to study a particular animal or plant behaviour with no consideration of the climate, only to have climate change forcefully take over the study, producing data on a totally different issue. Keeping the reader on side is one of Hanson's strong points. Just occasionally he tries a bit too hard - there's an occasion where he takes a whole page of text just to tell us that trees don't move in the normal sense, invoking everything from Birnam Wood to ents - but generally there is plenty to carry the reader along.

Although Hanson suffers a little from scientists' blinkers - in, for example, continuing to fly around the world, or in his contorted defence of his son's enthusiasm for an old petrol-hungry tractor - there is a more balanced realism here than is often seen in climate change polemics. This accompanies the reality that there have been plenty of examples of climate change in the past which have also had huge impacts on species distribution or extinction. Hanson recognises that we can't preserve things as they are in aspic - but equally makes clear just how complex the interplay of species is, so that the movement of a species that seems to have no obvious impact can, through the chain of interaction with other species around it, result in radical shifts that have impact on many other species, including humans.

An enjoyable, thought provoking book.

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Review by Brian Clegg
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