Review by Booklist Review
British writer Bell initiates this look at the "epic history of the climate crisis" with the Great Exhibition of 1851, the wildly successful celebration of the United Kingdom's power and innovation. From there, the author leads readers on a fast-moving journey through the Industrial Revolution on into the twentieth century, dropping names both familiar and forgotten. While emphasizing inventors and scientists, Bell also notes those who issued early calls of concern about rapid development, from such Cassandra figures as William Blake and Henry David Thoreau, who pondered just how high a price would ultimately be paid for the eager embrace of unchecked technologies. Their comments were easily overlooked in the rush for technological advancements, however, as Bell shows in her assessments of the eager burning of coal, whale oil, and fossil fuels. The expansive research involved is laudable, while the packed narrative moves so rapidly it serves as a survey rather than an historical treatise. Bell's overview of how industrialization led to the climate crisis is a good match for those seeking a brisk approach to the subject.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The discovery of climate change arrived not with a bang but slowly over many centuries of lesser-known findings, writes activist and journalist Bell (Can We Save The Planet?) in this thorough and sweeping history of the climate crisis. Bell traces "how we built systems, technologies and deeply embedded cultures for the burning of coal, gas and oil at scale" to track "how we discovered the climate crisis was happening in the first place." She begins in 1851, at England's Great Exhibition, which was among the first events to rely heavily on coal-powered steam engines and marked "an age of prosperity" powered by fossil fuels. Subsequent biographies include John D. Rockefeller and his control of the oil industry and Eunice Newton Foote, who discovered the greenhouse effect in 1856. (Meanwhile, "the first recorded tree huggers" emerged in India in 1730.) Bell makes a convincing case that in order to effectively deal with climate change, people must understand how the world got to this point: "We've inherited an almighty mess, but we've also inherited a lot of tools that could... help us and others survive" through modern climate science. Impressive in scope, this deserves wide readership. Agent: Donald Winchester, Watson Little. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This book by climate activist Bell stands out from the herd of recent titles on climate change, for its unlikely origin (as an alternative walking tour of London) and its lively account of the innovators, inventors, instigators and investigators of industry, energy, and climate in Great Britain, Europe, and the United States. Bell's account of the climate crisis is both historical (spanning the 18th through 21st centuries) and personal and fully demonstrates her PhD in science communication. It's especially readable and engaging for its fascinating narratives of little-known climate scientists and activists who first sounded the alarm, and its particular attention to Black innovators whose scientific contributions have been overlooked. She adeptly recognizes the impact of scientific and technological developments on social ills; for instance, she considers the real and projected implications of switching from fossil fuels to electricity. Bell's outlook for the future is dim, given the irreversibility of some climate effects, but she's ultimately hopeful that climate scientists and technologists still have options for altering the current trajectory. Bell runs a UK climate action non-profit called Possible, whose name says it all. VERDICT If readers seek just one book to explain how the world arrived at the current climate crisis, this one would be a great suggestion. Bell's accessible writing will find a wide audience.--Teresa R. Faust, Coll. of Central Florida, Ocala
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Broad-ranging history of the catastrophic crisis that is well underway. Bell, a climate activist based in London, opens her account with a moment that will come as news even to readers versed in the literature: when a scientist and women's rights activist named Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated in 1856 that "an atmosphere heavy with carbon dioxide could send temperatures soaring." The results of Foote's experimental work were presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and then shelved until 2011, when a petroleum geologist chanced upon it. As Bell writes, it would not be the first time that data would be ignored. Her narrative zigzags among the Enlightenment and the present and points between, tracing how ideas about the climate as a world system came to be codified. Some of the narrative feels like a data dump, but the author's account takes on greater force in her discussions of the near past and present, when inescapable evidence mounts to indicate how badly we've erred in overlooking the deleterious effects of fossil fuels. And it is we, collectively, who have brought this on. Although "the climate crisis has been and remains a problem of elites' making," enriching a handful of mostly White men, it is a problem that has been aired in the past and then brushed aside time and again. Bell is at her best when recounting these frequent observations, many of which were taken positively, as when a Swedish glaciologist argued that the retreat of glaciers around the world was really an example of "climate embetterment." It has become clear that it is not an improvement, and Bell warns that we have to remake the world's economy while also adapting to the effects of climate change already in motion--"and we have a rapidly vanishing snippet of time in which to do all this." A touch scattered but of interest to anyone concerned with climate change and our long, lamentable history of ignoring it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
