I had wanted to read his book [book:Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border|41817501], but never managed to get to it, so when I saw this I grabbed it. Phenomenal book, a little memoir, adventure, and climatology. Unfortunately those who don't believe in climate change, those who need to read this the most, won't and if they did they wouldn't believe what they read. Climate change has been politicized just like Covid, vaccines and voting. I don't see how anyone could read this and not feel a sense of urgency. Fox talks to geologists, climatologists, even the I hits who have seen first hand the melting ice, glaciers. He talked to other experts and specialists running various experiments to see just how fast things are occuring. From fires to glacier ice, to Winters becoming shorter and shorter, storms coming Ng stronger and more often, we are at the tipping point. The next crisis of refugees may be those escaping places that will no longer be livable. ( )

This is the second book by Fox I have read and once again I am impressed more by the idea then the execution. Sure, any book about climate change should get 5 stars but there are so many of them now they are not all equal. Fox's Big Idea is that winter is getting shorter globally. Invariably there will be no winter anymore, one long never ending summer like at the equator. Fox travels to hot spots in Alaska, the Alps, Greenland - mountains all - where the impacts are most stark as snow lines, ski resorts, glaciers rapidly disappear. He talks to experts, locals, describes his admittedly awesome travel itinerary. In the end, I doubt much in this book will stick with me. Except the ending, the last 20 pages or so, he is on the Greenland ice sheet with native hunters when COVID first hits NYC, where his wife and children are. He's got to get out, get on a plane, etc.. it's dramatic. The writing is not bad but often he says something interesting then skips to the next thing, it's broad and shallow. If you don't read much on climate change it might be amazing to learn how many feet the sea will rise when Greenland melts, and the number of people who live close to the coasts world wide, the sort of stuff every climate book reports on. Maybe he is swinging for too much and reaping too little - travel, climate, philosophy, biography, autobiography, explorer history, natural history. ( )

research, travel, interviews, field-work, nonfiction, science, natural-history, nature-study, climatology, global-issues*****

Very well written and easily understood, this treatise describes the author's involvement with scientists investigating the effects of the arctic melt at present and what will happen if we don't make a concerted effort to reverse the trend. Read and become more aware!
I requested and received a free temporary PDF from Little, Brown and Company via NetGalley. Too bad a form with TTS was not on offer. ( )

“Warm Atlantic currents are fast melting the Arctic ice,” my grandfather said in an interview in 1960. He warned that within 150 years, Detroit could be under water, “caused by torrential rains caused by the Arctic ice melting.”

In 1958, my grandfather had read an article in Harper’s called “The Coming Ice Age” by Betty Freidan. It was about the Theory of Ice Ages proposed by Columbia University professors Dr. Maurice Ewing and Dr. William L. Donn. Gramps became a climate change believer. He wrote countless letters to the men, and I have their letters back in my possession. Gramps tapped his college friend Roger Blough, then president of U. S. Steel, to grant the Lamont researchers $25,000 for their project.

A letter dated August 17, 1959, from Dr. Ewing noted, “…a Mr. Vajado has returned from the north pole with the news that there is a lot of hot water coming into the Arctic, both through the Bering Straits and from the Gulf Stream.” As I was born in 1952, I essentially grew up in a family where talk about climate change and melting Arctic ice, rising sea waters, and torrential rains was table talk.

Toward the end of Porter Fox’s book The Last Winter, he writes about rising sea levels and geoengineering projects including floating seawalls to block warm water currents from glaciers.

The mention of the floating seawalls sent me spinning back to my grandfather’s hobby horse: he was convinced that portable dams could block warm surface sea water and prevent further melting of Arctic ice. Gramps wanted to prevent a new Ice Age.

Climate science has changed since 1959, and we have had years to observe the effects of fossil fuels. Porter Fox is concerned not with glaciers taking over the Earth, but the end of glaciers and the havoc it would create.

Without glacier and mountain melt, rivers dry up. If rivers dry up, transportation is curtailed, human populations are without a water source, agriculture is affected, and mass migration is inevitable.

Fox traveled to the North Cascades, Alaska, the Swiss Alps, and Greenland to see how climate change and global warming is affecting these iconic ‘winter wonderlands’.

Part travelogue, part memoir, part biographical sketches, and part nature writing, the book is highly entertaining. His portraits of the people he met are wonderful, and I was very sorrowful when he wrote of the death of one man.

The book is also highly terrifying. More than one chapter’s end left me dejected and hopeless about the future we have fashioned for ourselves. The Earth will remain, but the future for humanity is so overwhelmingly bleak, it makes me accept that I have no grandchildren to survive it.

And yet…is there yet time to change our course? At least enough to prevent the worst case scenario? I dream of the wealthy putting their money to use to save the world, funding inventions to draw out carbon monoxide from the atmosphere, or alternative energy sources, and things I can’t even imagine but someone out there surely can.

Fox barely made it off Greenland in time to reenter America before the Covid-19 shut down. He and his family left the city for the mountains, enjoying the white world of ice and snow, aware that at any time, the winter he has loved could be the last.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased. ( )