Half-Full or Half-Empty?

Just days before writing this review, at the end of the first week of March, I flew with a group of Canadian atmospheric scientists from Eureka on Ellesmere Island—the northern-most permanent research station in the world—to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. The Summit Air charter was aloft for about seven hours and, for that entire distance, at a ground speed of roughly 200 nautical miles an hour, the snow and ice below stretched without a break from horizon to horizon.

If you accept the apocalyptic and often simplistic environmental analysis in Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: How We Are Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, all this frozen expanse is teetering on the knife edge of climate change and will disappear unless each of us switches to a “green” electricity supplier, installs solar hot-water heating, trades in the family SUV for a hybrid fuel vehicle, abandons power tools, and so on—and then convinces our employers...