Editorial Review:
"President Bush and his Administration have risen to the global warming challenge with responses ranging from obfuscation to pretense to outright denial...I'd like to issue each and every one of them a challenge. Come with me--see what I have seen--and try to understand what global warming really means for us and for our children. Leave Washington and travel to the places I have visited..."--From the Preface
A glacier disappears high in the Peruvian Andes. Floodwaters surge across the English countryside. Ten thousand Pacific Islanders begin to evacuate their homeland. A dust storm turns day into night across the Inner Mongolian plains. These events may seem unrelated, but they are not. Even as scientists and other experts debate the specifics, climate crisis is already affecting the lives of millions.
In this ground-breaking book, Mark Lynas reveals the first evidence--collected during an epic three-year journey across five continents--about how global warming is hitting people's lives all around the world. From American hurricane chasers to Mongolian herders, from Alaskan Eskimos to South Sea islanders, Lynas's encounters and discoveries give us a stark warning about the even worse dangers that lie ahead if nothing is done.
High Tide's message is urgent and its revelations are at once shocking and inspiring--shocking as so few of us yet realize the magnitude of what’s happening, and inspiring as there is still time to avert much greater catastrophe. No one who reads this book will be able to look their children in the eyes and say "I didn’t know."
As global temperatures soar to record levels, Lynas bears witness to:
- CRIPPLING DROUGHT: China's Yellow River no longer reaches the sea for half the year, and villages across the north of the country are disappearing under advancing sand dunes
- BAKED ALASKA: Permafrost is melting, leaving houses, roads and whole forests sucked into the thawing ground. Winter is in retreat, leaving animals confused and Native Alaskan people without a livelihood
- DISAPPEARING GLACIERS: Every glaciated mountain range on Earth is experiencing massive ice losses. Montana's Glacier National Park has lost 100 glaciers in the last century; only 50 remain. Water supplies to hundreds of millions of people--from Peru to Pakistan--are threatened
- HIGH TIDES: Islanders on the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu are already leaving their homeland as rising sea levels engulf their atolls. Today 70 percent of the world’s sandy shorelines are retreating; up to 90 percent of the beaches on the Eastern U.S. seaboard are eroding fast
- CATASTROPHIC FLOODS: English villagers now talk about a "wet season" rather than a winter. Heavier rainfall is now falling across the global mid-latitudes, from the continental U.S. to Russia, sparking devastating floods on an ever more frequent basis.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Excellent Review of the Current State of the World  2008-03-27
High Tide is amazing, not for predicting the future of the planet, but for telling you, in very personal terms, what is happening in the world today. I spent 14 years in and out of Alaska and became very well acquainted with the entire state, but have not returned since 1987. I was absolutely shocked at how our Northernmost state is suffering from the 10 (!) degree rise in temperature which is melting the permafrost. The resulting damage to homes, forests, native life, and other facets of an incredibly beautiful state deeply saddens me and gives me a strong urge to do something serious about global warming. This book really makes global warming upfront, real, and personal without preaching or supplying solutions. Things are simply reported the way they are without predjudice. I highly recommend it. Our politicians should be duct-taped to chairs and forced to read this book.
Once you have become thoroughly depressed by reading the state of the world in "High Tide", by all means obtain a copy of "Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming" by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn. That book gives an outlook on all of the alternative means of producing energy that have a zero or low carbon footprint. Good Reading.
Global Warming 2007-01-30
This was an interesting read--a little behind the times--but still applicable today. I rec'd an A on my report on this subject!!! Apparently I chose wisely!
Furthering the environmental dialogue, HIGH TIDE is far from a primer, ladies & gentlemen...far from it! 2006-11-01
One of the best things I enjoyed about reading HIGH TIDE, I believe, was a remark author Mark Lynas made somewhere towards the end of this book. It's placement was entirely not the issue--perhaps even random, it was--but its content impressed upon me something vital and rather deeply, at that.
Lynas shared his initial concern over his lack of "complete scientific justification" for many of the things he was discussing with other professionals in the field. At certain points along his journey from enviro-curious to enviro-conscious, it caused him to question his overall motives, internalizing the criticisms he occasionally received from colleagues, friends, and family who began to perhaps think of him as something of a radical fundamentalist, environmentally-speaking.
Lynas told us how he felt slightly emasculated by some of the larger minds in the global environmental movement, and how if he were to take up the mantle of environmentalism, cleaner living, and self-limiting lifestyle techniques, thereby curbing his own contribution to the global carbon sink, how he'd potentially be branded by these same people a dilettante, a novice, a dabbler...even worse.
I'd have to admit that *this* was the line which clinched HIGH TIDE's premise for yours truly.
This--despite all of the fascinating accounts of Mark's globetrotting, his meanderings about the island nation of Tuvalu (itself sufficient, IMHO, for a whole book-length treatment on its own!), and his discoveries that the same Peruvian glacier which his father spied twenty years across a pristine high-altitude glacial lake had simply disappeared due to global warming--was the lone sentiment which I carted away with me from this read. It's the same one which I'll be sharing with my friends when they ask me what I've been reading of late.
It's hard not to admire Lynas, folks.
Global travel is tough on the sojourner. It doesn't matter who's footing the bill, m'kay, so let's just dismiss the commonly held belief that travel is amazing uf you're not the one paying for it. That's poppycock! These days, intercontinental travel is pure hell, and it's not been made any easier by the state of the world we live in...and I'm talking air travel, exclusively.
In essence, the person who does the travelling is forced to adjust to time zones, potential linguistic barriers, radical temperature shifts, lingering political effects, and in poor Mark's case, what can be best described as a "near-death experience."
In vivid detail, Mark describes how he ignored his own best advice regarding too rapid high-altitude ascent in the Andes, with thank goodness only remotely-disastrous consequences.
Mark spun around the globe, literally, spanning every hemisphere: north, south, east, and west. He bore the brunt of the climactic travails and the ravages of their overall toll on his own body, to deliver up this compelling piece of too-true non-fiction.
It does get depressing at a stage. Though not due to Mark's entertaining authorial style. It has more to do with the vagaries of of the Kyoto Protocol's acceptance (as in, what does it MEAN?), and what its various stipulations and evasive phraseologies will in fact, entail (concretely, in other words) when the time comes to implement things rigidly. And, like Lynas and other climatologists have long since been evangelizing--and they've already purchased jars of white talcum powder to mask just how blue in the face they really are from preaching to us the vital message--the reckoning is certainly coming.
In the British edition of the book, there's this great section toward the end where Mark is himself being interviewed about the latest developments *since* his publication of HIGH TIDE. In what could be best described as "I told you so," things indeed had tumbled precipitously since the 2004 publication year. We had Katrina in New Orleans, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and restrictions on population flow between Tuvalu and New Zealand as part of those latter two countries' "special [population] arrangement."
SIX DEGREES, Mark's announced next book, will only be better, but only because it will be more vivid, more viseral, and more hard-hitting, as more and more people will identify with its descriptions...all because more people will have been directly affected by the things that Mark's been writing about all along.
Think of all he's seen, done, heard about, and learned in the interim--not to mention the "degree" to which he'd internalized the things he'd seen and heard during his travels. How much better he's improved, though the overall global prognosis has gotten terribly worse.
I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a copy. But "looking forward" is too passive.
Like I said in the subject heading, this is certainly no primer, kids! For a first effort, it's challenged a heck of a lot of preconceived notions, and caused wide swathes of people to start talking. In this reviewer's hands, that's a heck of a lot more than I can say for some other people who don't walk the proverbial talk.
--ADM in Prague
Sobering stories but naive solutions  2006-03-04
Mark Lynas traveled around the world to find tangible symptoms of global warming. He found them indeed, and some of them are truly heartbreaking. From the Pacific islanders who are preparing to abandon their island home, to the Alaskans in crazy, tilting houses over a foundation of melting permafrost, to the author's own flooding England, the stories hit home. It's hard to deny global warming after this.
But Lynas, like many environmental activists, falls flat on his solutions. For example, he says that because burning any more oil will worsen warming, "there should be a worldwide halt to the exploration and development of new oil, coal and gas reserves, because even existing reserves should never be burned as fuel." In his fear of warming, Lynas doesn't consider the immediate human suffering that such a rash course would create. It seems like he doesn't know--or doesn't care--how much our society relies on oil, not only for 90% of our transportation but for much of our food, pharmaecuticals, and other life-critical applications. For civilization to continue, we need a gradual, orderly draw-down from fossil fuels, not a crashing halt.
It might comfort Lynas to know that we'll have to get off oil anyway even without global warming, because cheap oil is fast running out. Those remaining reserves will be so much more difficult and expensive to pump than our oil today that we'll never even have a chance to use them up. And just as supply peaks, there's rising demand from China and India. $10 a gallon gas will get us off oil more quickly than fear of warming. But then our society will face other problems--including potential political collapse--that will make it all the more difficult to deal with warming. For more realistic talk on energy, I'd look to books on "peak oil" such as James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" or Richard Heinberg's "Power Down."
Lynas is just as naive in his approach to politics, assuming that if people--especially Americans, who emit most greenhouse gases--learn the facts, they'll all start thinking and acting like greenies. Yet we all know that the biggest barrier to stopping global warming is not lack of scientific knowlege or even popular awareness, but economic and political short-sightedness. The rich don't want to change their ways, and they'll use power, influence, and corruption to preserve their wealth, warming be damned. For a more nuanced look, try the Ehrlichs' "One with Nineveh." They talk about changes in government and business that will have to happen to save the earth, showing a much more complete understanding of the human-nature equation than does Lynas, who sees retreating glaciers more clearly than he sees expanding markets.
An example of the postmodern intellectual deterioration  2005-11-24
Mark Lynas is a person who has no idea about nature, science, and technology. But he has received a lot of money to travel. So he has traveled to various places and decided to become a kind of "concerned journalist".
The advantage is that you don't have to know science, history, or anything else to become a concerned journalist. If you get the money, everything is fine.
While he is not interested about the actual dynamics of weather and climate at various places, he is extremely interested in the "political applications" of the climate data. His book is full of various conspiratory theories involving the oil companies, the Bush administration, the Kyoto protocol, and other things.
He experiences a flood in Great Britain. (A lot of boring details about the train schedule and other things are included.) What is the reason? Climate change, of course. No, he is not interested in the actual statistical distribution of the floods.
Also, Alaska is too hot for him. It is, in fact, "baked". What is the reason? Climate change, silly.
There are several more anecdotes like that. The beauty of the islands in the Pacific ocean will disappear, he argues. And look at the red clouds in China and the hurricanes. Or the heat in Peru. All these things are caused by climate change, he writes.
Instead of a single rational idea or a piece of research, he offers you contacts to various soft eco-terrorist organizations. The number of people whose intellectual standards resemble those of Mr. Lynas will undoubtedly increase for years to come. And these people who know absolutely nothing but who want to influence absolutely everything will be flooding the market with similar books like this one.
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