Skip to main content

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.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

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

Labels

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

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more