Fools Rule

September 12, 2011
With lively prose and a healthy serving of sarcasm and welcome indignation, Canadian investigative reporter Marsden (Stupid to the Last Drop) brings levity to this otherwise deeply depressing analysis of the failure of the Copenhagen and Cancun climate summits. In between, he travels to the Canadian High Arctic to hang with climate scientists and encounter evidence of incontrovertible global warming. As glaciologist Martin Sharp puts it, “the consensus is beginning to think that we are going to hell in a handbasket and that there is no turning back. But we don’t understand things well enough to know if that is true.” Trekking to the world’s most northern research station to take “the amplified pulse of climate change at its very heart,” Marsden finds a scientist who refuses to talk, “both a victim and a tool of the government’s clampdown on information leaking out about the severity of climate change in the Arctic,” apparently a result of the alliance of the Alberta tar sands gas and oil lobby and the Conservative party that have together destroyed Canada’s carbon reduction efforts. Probing the apparent inability of humans to effectively attack this potentially deadly crisis, Marsden offers a solution: skip the useless negotiations among politicians altogether and bring experts together to make concrete plans. “Our brains have an amazing ability to chart new courses,” he concludes. “Why not use them?”