**95th Climate Book**

(I read only the sections on climate change; the sections on war and violence I skimmed, but too quickly to comment on it)

I'm giving up on Roy Scranton.

He writes beautifully. It's lyrical and well-constructed. However, if this book were written by a woman, it would be called histrionic. These essays are beautifully written explorations of Scranton's feelings of doom, and a select few cherry-picked facts to support that feeling, all cobbled together with duct tape and chicken wire to support a program of inaction.

Example 1: Repeated statements that "we have already exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures." Except that we haven't, so what is he talking about? He is talking about specific months that have exceeded 1.5C. You can't compare a specific month with a pre-industrial average of all seasons! Our current average exceedance is around 1C, which is very bad, and we're likely to get to 1.5C sometime this century--we certainly will if we don't act strenuously. But this ... error? oversight? ... is significant, because the 1.5C threshold is the "civilization falls apart" threshold.

Example 2: Later, in an essay that I think is about the anthropocene as a term but also borderline incoherent, he engaged in an extended defence of an early 20th century scientist with a history of scientific hoaxes named Chambers because he gave a talk in 1945 with "anthropocene" in the title. He also describes an experiment conducted in the 1920s by Chambers, in which he hired oilmen to drill into the earth's crust so he could fire a gun into it, to test his theory that the earth was a living organism (seems right in line with earlier 'gentlemen-naturalists' who would go on voyages to 'unexplored' locations and think, "What a pretty bird! Let me kill a bunch of them so I can take them home and sell them to museums!" and ended up driving these treasured species to extinction). The experiment ended in an explosion and three deaths, but, says Scranton, what if this proves that Chambers was right and the earth killed them in self-defence? (!!!) His evidence? Diary entries on the event from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author and strong believer in the paranormal. Not that Doyle's biases are mentioned in Scranton's text.

The entire book is a confusion of his feelings with facts. He feels doomed; therefore, we are doomed; he feels action is pointless; therefore, there is no point; here are some carefully selected part-facts in support of those feelings; the rest of the facts are swept under the rug; he then performs lyrical acrobats on top of the rug-lumps in an effort to flatten them/distract readers; then he cries. He does not need book contracts. He needs therapy. ( )

Essay collections are one of my favorite books to read, but I listened to this book on Audible which was a different experience entirely. When you read a book of essays you can skip the ones you don't like, while listening to essays while driving and trying to skip any is just too much distraction. I respect Roy Scranton's intellect and his worldview, but this book is pretty gloomy. I also didn't like the essays on Iraji politics and elections, which I ended up skipping through after listening to 20 chapters. It's worth reading if you are interested on the state the world in in right now, and our culture's view of violence as redemptive. ( )

Roy Scranton is an interesting person. A teenage reprobate, full of angst and protest, he drifted from one low level job to another, eventually coming back to live in his mother’s basement. A stint in the army that took him to Iraq both straightened him out and screwed him up. He came back to become a scholar, intensely well read, citing all kinds of obscure references and dropping a lot of names, even just long lists of them, but totally consumed by war. It is all on evidence in We’re Doomed. Now What?

It begins with a series of perceptive essays on the environment. “We need to learn to let our current civilization die, to accept our mortality and practice humility,” he says. He visits Greenland where he finds it is losing about 300 billion tons of ice every year. This alone will raise sea levels more than 20 feet. “We find ourselves less than human, lacking even the dumb instinct for survival we see in the way plants will bend toward the sun.”

Those first essays are powerful. But from there, things get confusing. Scranton spends over a hundred pages reliving his army stint in Iraq, and revisits, on behalf of Rolling Stone, to discover how corrupt and messed up their elections are. He then pivots to the Soviet Union and how much it sacrificed in World War II, then to Seymour Hersh’s article claiming the Osama Bin Laden trackdown was a fraud. He also draws parallels and connections between police shooting blacks and American wars and warriors. You might notice the book on the environment and climate change has completely disappeared.

So despite the title, this is not a book on the environment. It is a cathartic collection of disparate essays from 2010-1018, demonstrating Scranton’s erudition and ability to research. But everything is suffused with soldiering and war. He blames the USA for Iraq and Afghanistan’s “ongoing human suffering almost incomprehensible in its meaninglessness. “ At times it is profound, but it is often PTSD on display.

David Wineberg ( )