Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Man, Nature, and Climate Change
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Narrated by:
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Hope Davis
About this listen
Taking listeners from the melting Alaskan permafrost to storm-torn New Orleans, acclaimed journalist Elizabeth Kolbert approaches this monumental problem from every angle. She interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science, draws frightening parallels to lost civilizations, and presents the moving tales of people who are watching their worlds disappear. Growing out of an award-winning three-part series for The New Yorker, Field Notes from a Catastrophe brings the environment into the consciousness of the American people and asks what, if anything, can be done to save our planet.
Field Notes from a Catastrophe is our Editors' Pick for Nonfiction. Find out what else made Audible's Best of 2006 list.; Download the accompanying reference guide.©2006 Elizabeth Kolbert. All rights reserved (P)2006 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Powerful, clear, and important." (Scientific American)
"Kolbert's calmly persuasive reporting stands out for its sobering clarity....Kolbert lets facts rather than polemics tell the story....This unbiased overview is a model for writing about an urgent environmental crisis." (Publishers Weekly)
"Illuminating and sobering....Includes fascinating accounts of how climate changes affected the planet in the past, and how such changes are occurring in different parts of the world right now." (The New York Review of Books)
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From Joseph Romm, Chief Science Advisor for National Geographic's Years of Living Dangerously series and one of Rolling Stone's "100 people who are changing America," Climate Change offers user-friendly, scientifically rigorous answers to the most difficult (and commonly politicized) questions surrounding what climatologist Lonnie Thompson has deemed "a clear and present danger to civilization."
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Religious not scientific claims and preachings
- By Jeanne Renzo on 09-19-19
By: Joseph Romm
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No Immediate Danger
- Carbon Ideologies, Volume One
- By: William T. Vollmann
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age. Now, Vollmann turns to a topic that will define the generations to come - the factors and human actions that have led to global warming. Vollmann begins No Immediate Danger by examining and quantifying the many causes of climate change, from industrial manufacturing and agricultural practices to fossil fuel extraction, economic demand for electric power, and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort.
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Look at the brightside always and die in a dream!
- By Darwin8u on 04-14-19
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The Great Oil Conspiracy
- How the U.S. Government Hid the Nazi Discovery of Abiotic Oil from the American People
- By: Jerome R. Corsi
- Narrated by: Fleet Cooper
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of World War II, U.S. intelligence agents confiscated thousands of Nazi documents on what was known as the “Fischer-Tropsch Process” - a series of equations developed by German chemists unlocking the secrets of how oil is formed. When the Nazis took power, Germany had resolved to develop enough synthetic oil to wage war successfully, even without abundant national oil reserves.
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Complete and total waste of time
- By Dustin on 07-25-14
By: Jerome R. Corsi
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The Ocean of Life
- The Fate of Man and the Sea
- By: Callum Roberts
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Who can forget the sense of wonder with which they discovered the creatures of the deep? In this vibrant hymn to the sea, Callum Roberts - one of the world’s foremost conservation biologists - leads listeners on a fascinating tour of mankind’s relationship to the sea, from the earliest traces of water on Earth to the oceans as we know them today. In the process, Roberts looks at how the taming of the oceans has shaped human civilization and affected marine life. Like Four Fish and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Ocean of Life takes a long view to tell a story in which each one of us has a role to play.
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Immediate fan of Mr Roberts
- By Anna on 06-25-24
By: Callum Roberts
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Overheated
- How Climate Change Will Cause Floods, Famine, War, and Disease
- By: Andrew T. Guzman
- Narrated by: Fleet Cooper
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order.
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A must read!
- By Ted on 03-22-15
By: Andrew T. Guzman
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
- By: Bill Bryson
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 18 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science. Although he doesn't know anything about the subject (at first), he is eager to learn, and takes information that he gets from the world's leading experts and explains it to us in a way that makes it exciting and relevant.
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The Only Book I reread imediatley after reading
- By Andrew on 11-09-09
By: Bill Bryson
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The Soil Will Save Us
- How Scientists, Farmers, and Ranchers Are Tending the Soil to Reverse Global Warming
- By: Kristin Ohlson
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming. Her discoveries and vivid storytelling will revolutionize the way we think about our food, our landscapes, our plants, and our relationship to Earth.
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Rambling, mile wide, inch deep treatment of a subject
- By Charles Phillips on 10-17-18
By: Kristin Ohlson
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Cadillac Desert, Revised and Updated Edition
- The American West and Its Disappearing Water
- By: Marc Reisner
- Narrated by: Joe Spieler, Kate Udall
- Length: 27 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruptions and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecologic and economic disaster. In Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants to transform the West.
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Too much mouth noise in narration
- By AES on 07-23-19
By: Marc Reisner
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The Alchemy of Air
- A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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At the dawn of the 20th century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the worlds scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives.
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Great Book Thoroughly Researched
- By Terry A. Gray on 10-21-11
By: Thomas Hager
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The Boom
- How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
- By: Russell Gold
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.
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Somehow the author manages to stay balanced
- By Emily C on 05-28-14
By: Russell Gold
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Five Billion Years of Solitude
- The Search for Life Among the Stars
- By: Lee Billings
- Narrated by: Lee Billings
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Since its formation nearly five billion years ago, our planet has been the sole living world in a vast and silent universe. Now, Earth's isolation is coming to an end. Over the past two decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of "exoplanets" orbiting other stars, including some that could be similar to our own world. Studying those distant planets for signs of life will be crucial to understanding life's intricate mysteries right here on Earth. In a firsthand account of this unfolding revolution, Lee Billings draws on interviews with top researchers.
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Bloated
- By Dr A on 01-09-14
By: Lee Billings
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Lifts you out of the ordinary
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In H Is for Hope, Elizabeth Kolbert investigates the landscape of climate change—from “A,” for Svante Arrhenius, who created the world’s first climate model in 1894, to “Z,” for the Colorado River Basin, ground zero for climate change in the United States. Along the way she looks at Greta Thunburg’s “blah blah blah” speech (“B”), learns to fly an all-electric plane (“E”), experiments with the effects of extreme temperatures on the human body (“T”), and struggles with the deep uncertainty of the future of climate change (“U”).
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This Changes Everything
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In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.
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Didactic and preachy... and I agree with her
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An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation’s Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it - the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action.
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Don’t read if you have depressive tendencies.
- By Ricky on 03-17-19
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A major audiobook about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes. Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
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Lifts you out of the ordinary
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Didactic and preachy... and I agree with her
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What listeners say about Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Karl Ide-Pech
- 11-16-16
more people should read this
really informative and easy to follow. good narration. opened my eyes even more to some of the politics of climate change.
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- Anonymous User
- 02-05-18
informational but slow.
informational but slow and drawn out. had to read for my college environmental history class.
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- Cindy
- 02-23-22
Excellent
Hard to believe we can know this much, and yet do so little to correct things for future generations.
A well told story. Easy to understand. Sometimes a little funny which is necessary to keep you from weeping for the future lives of our children.
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- Scott
- 09-10-23
As relevant now as in 2010
While it may seem a bit disheartening to realize how little we’ve done since 2010 to change the amount of CO2 we emit, at least we have started to ramp up the amount of solar and wind energy that we use.
In the time since this book was written, coal has become used less and less here in the United States, because wind and solar have become cheaper to bring online than coal.
Also, the electrification of cars, such as the Tesla, has become a widespread phenomenon.
Wow, we have had the hottest years recorded in just the last couple of years. It is a bit disheartening that certain political groups are still pushing. The climate change is not a man-made phenomena.
This book does an excellent job of balancing between being educational, without going into climate doomerism. The adventure stories of those who go to the ends of the Earth to obtain data about the climate and about the climate of days past captured in ancient ice, and rock keeps the listener engaged.
This book is is as essential now as it was in 2010, if not more so. An excellent read and well worth recommending.
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- Superfan
- 02-04-17
Probably better as a physical book
Contains a lot of facts but little story. Therefore, it makes kind of a boring audiobook. I'm pretty sure I would like it better if I could see the words on a page rather than listening to it as I commute to work.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Alison Willette
- 02-01-18
Fantastic naritive! Strong evadence based argument
Story line: Kolbert does a great job of pulling you into the story of her exploration of climate change.
Narration: Not the best. Not horrible either but Davis's tone does not make me feel like she totally understands what she is describing.
Facts and background: The writer does a phenomenal job of giving you the information without adding too much scientific jargon. I am in a deep scientific field and could still enjoy it. It wasn't too simple.
Sources: Kolbert Does a great job of telling you the names of the people that she meets and where they are located so that you can personally look into their credentials.
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- Betsy
- 01-27-20
Important book on the science of climate change
The most alarming thing about this book is that it was written 16 years ago. We have so much knowledge and technological capability and have done so little about climate change. NOTE: I was disappointed to find that Audible has not updated the book to include the chapters that were added in 2015.
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- roryski
- 02-27-11
A must read for everyone!
The author knows how to write and to convey information without patronizing the audience - she is about information (draw your own conclusions). The book also does not fall into the statistics trap.
Without hesitation an excellent (albeit frightning) resource on climate change and it's consequences.
Reader is also perfectly suited.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Danny J. Lesandrini
- 04-21-06
Very well done!
I came to the subject of Global Warming with only a vague concern, and very little bias. Sure, my wife and I each drive a Prius and we recycle, but before reading this book I wasn't really <b><i>worried</i></b>. Now, I'm keeping watch for ways to be part of the solution.
The book is well written with an easy style. The author weaves scientific elements into the story of human life, making the listen both interesting and informative. While I found the middle of the book to drag a bit, the last chapters more than made up for any necessary foundation laid therein.
Thank you, Elizabeth Kolbert, for your clear and scientific explanation of the facts that fuel the fears of global warming. I wish everyone would read this book!
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13 people found this helpful
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- Jackie
- 04-28-06
One Scary Book
This has to be the scariest book I have ever listened to. In her calm, state the facts way, she step by step teaches how the planet is changing at an unprecedented rate and how the US is lagging far behind in taking action. Riveting book well worth the time to listen to.
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11 people found this helpful