Anti-climatic

Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
By Elizabeth Kolbert
Bloomsbury, 210 pp., $22.95

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
By Tim Flannery
Atlantic Monthly, 357 pp., illustrated, $24

The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations
By Eugene Linden
Simon & Schuster, 302 pp., illustrated, $26

Last year was not only the warmest in human history. It may also have been the year when many Americans finally began to understand, on some gut level, just what that warmth will mean. In the span of a few short weeks in the fall, two pieces of news broke through into public consciousness. One: Arctic ice was melting very, very fast, nearing or perhaps passing what one American scientist called a ''tipping point" of irreversibility. Two: Hurricane Katrina roared through the Gulf of Mexico powered by a layer of hot seawater that also gave us Rita and Wilma and right on around the alphabet up through Epsilon.

Global warming had switched categories, from possible theoretical problem to immediate and profound crisis. The nation's politicians may not have noticed, but the nation's publishers have. A spate of books on climate change are appearing this winter, a welcome development. Given the fact that global warming may be the biggest single peril humans have ever made for themselves, deadlier and trickier even than the nuclear thickets of the last century, surprisingly few authors had taken the subject on. (A rare and important exception: Boston author and former Globe staffer Ross Gelbspan, whose ''The Heat Is On" and ''Boiling Point" are among the best pieces of scientific and political reporting in recent decades.)

Three new books -- ''Field Notes From a Catastrophe," by Elizabeth Kolbert, ''The Weather Makers," by Tim Flannery, and ''The Winds of Change," by Eugene Linden -- logically share many features. They tell the history of the idea of global warming, beginning with the European chemists who recognized in the late 19th century that burning coal (and soon gas and oil) was adding to the layer of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and hence threatening to heat the planet. The story resumes in the 1950s, when Dr. Charles Keeling began sampling the air to prove that it was indeed filling with carbon dioxide, and picks up speed in the 1980s, when supercomputers became powerful enough to run the elaborate models of the earth's climate that began predicting swift and remarkably powerful changes. In one sense, the tale reaches its apogee in 1988, when National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist James Hansen tells Congress that the earth indeed is warming -- and when polls show a huge spurt of public alarm, which culminates in Time magazine picking our blue-and-white orb as its planet of the year.

In the 15 years that followed, however, much of the attention died down. In precisely the years when truly heroic efforts to convert our energy systems to renewables (and, just as important, to help China and India launch on the path toward industrial development with solar and wind instead of coal) might have bent the ever-rising trajectory of carbon emissions, we instead focused our attention on the private lives of the Clintons, on the birth of the Internet, on the war on terrorism. All were important (well, two out of three), but none as important as this. One reason for the quiescence: The fossil fuel industry spent enormous sums blowing smoke into the debate by sponsoring a parade of shills who kept insisting that there was no scientific consensus. As Linden, veteran science correspondent for Time, explains: ''The standard climate-change . . . story usually includes a recapitulation of the basic science (which eats up a good deal of the story), a bit on the many unknowns of future climate change, and then gives the naysayers a chance to dispute the notion that climate change is a threat. Most stories also mention the expense of taking action. I've read scores of these stories and the takeaway message is that climate change is a complex problem with many unknowns and expensive solutions, a problem that won't impact our lives for many years if at all."

Now, thanks to all that inaction, we've moved on to the next stage in the story. It's too late to prevent dramatic and disruptive increases in temperature; we're now fighting to keep the miserable from becoming the unbearable. And it will be a difficult fight indeed, as each of these books makes clear in its own way.

Flannery is an Aussie, a citizen of the only other industrialized nation that has refused to sign on to the Kyoto accords. (Well, there's also Monaco and Liechtenstein.) He spent most of the 1990s, as he writes, ''busy with other things" and ''hoping an issue so big would sort itself out." When it didn't, he turned his full attention to the problem, offering a useful if very long account of the workings of the atmosphere, the recent history of earth's climate, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. He goes on to tour the most visible victims of climate change so far: the South American cloud forests, the coastal communities of the Arctic, the tropical reefs where hot water is bleaching away entire ecosystems. It is toward the end of his book, however, that he offers the most unique insights, precisely because he comes from a country that is among the world's most coal-dependent. Unlike the case with oil, the earth has enough coal to keep us all burning merrily for a long time to come, and since it's cheap to get at, it will be an eternal temptation. Flannery considers the huge technical challenges involved in current plans to pull the carbon from the exhaust streams of big power plants and pump it safely underground; he proposes instead that coal companies invest in growing and burning biomass. But he asks the three-degree question: ''Would industry really walk away from all that coal in mines and undeveloped reserves?" So far the answer is no, not in China, not in Australia, and not here in the United States. Unless that changes, most of the rest of the planning for climate change is academic.

Linden's book is massive too. Large chunks will be familiar to anyone who read Jared Diamond's recent ''Collapse," for he retells the sad story of the Greenland Norse and the Mayans and many others. Linden is fascinated by the history of climate's interaction with human society, and his accounts of the devastating effect of El Nino-spawned droughts and floods set up the very powerful and scary closing pages, when he predicts a future where a ''flickering climate" wreaks havoc across America. As crises like Katrina multiply, ''the cost of doing business would rise for every conceivable enterprise, reducing profitability as well as the pool of capital. . . . Financial panics . . . would return with a vengeance," followed by food hoarding, lawlessness, and a general ''hell on earth." When exemplars of the most mainstream media begin writing like that, it tells you something about the effect of talking with the scientists on the cutting edge of this work.

The best of these books, however, is Kolbert's ''Field Notes From a Catastrophe," adapted from her New Yorker series of last spring. It's among the few irreplaceable volumes yet written about climate change, in large measure because it is so understated. Kolbert knows that the trick to this kind of writing is not to stuff in every alarming fact -- one wrecked civilization (the Akkadians) is plenty. Instead, it's to pare away until the awful truth is glimpsed in its simplicity.

At barely more than a page apiece, Kolbert offers the best summary yet of two key issues. One is the ''thermal lag" caused by the slow heating of the oceans that means that even if we held carbon emissions steady now, the earth would continue to warm. This delay could be helpful if we used it to prepare for the catastrophe bearing down on us, but instead it has served mainly to ''allow us to keep adding CO{-2} to the atmosphere while fobbing the impacts off on our children and grandchildren." The second is just as important: She explains precisely why the American insistence that the Chinese and the Indians cut their emissions simultaneously with ours is both immoral and politically impossible, a debater's point instead of a real position.

Kolbert also provides some very dark comic relief in the form of her interview with Paula Dobriansky, the Bush administration's chief climate honcho who -- though she grants Kolbert only 15 minutes and 35 seconds of her time -- proves so embarrassingly short of talking points that she repeats herself ad nauseam. The real-world results of Bush vs. Gore were never made much clearer.

By book's end, Kolbert has quietly earned the right to say whatever she wants. ''It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose . . . to destroy itself," she writes. ''But that is what we are now in the process of doing."