High Tide: News from a warming world by Mark Lynas, Flamingo/HarperCollins, £16.99, ISBN 000713939X Reviewed by Fred Pearce
GLOBAL warming is everywhere. And Mark Lynas, in High Tide, a compelling work of reporting, has pursued its traces from his native River Thames to the ends of the Earth. He has been to the melting shores of Alaska and glaciers of Peru, to the spreading deserts of northern China and rising tides of the South Pacific. He has joined a hurricane watch in the US and a flood watch in Yorkshire – and watched protesters throw pies at American climate negotiators.
High Tide is the story of Lynas’s journey, told in the first person. But everywhere, it is the locals who speak of their pain and wonder at the weird weather coming their way. He has not written a forensic case that man-made global warming is the cause of all such weather. There are plenty of other places to read such arguments. Lynas’s account is anecdotal, almost travelogue. But for all but the most sceptical, he provides an overpowering whiff of warming.
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