Serreze's book takes the form of a very loose memoir, with stories of his time in the arctic as a young student to when he was quoted too much in the media in the years 2007+ as a prominent climate scientist trying to convince a skeptical public. It's peppered with personal anecdotes, but he also tries to bring the reader into the community of scientists, which is only half successful. He uses a lot of names, and it's easy to get lost in the forest of characters since he doesn't violate their privacy by telling stories about them. So lots of names, lots of acronyms, and it's hard to keep all of them straight. He's careful to explain a lot of things from the beginning to a lay audience, but in other places he quotes personal communication with his colleagues without explaining the terms they use (in one remarkable sentence, both calving tongues and basal lubrication go unexplained). So it's a little uneven, but if readers are willing to overlook some difficult technicalities, this is a good story. He's basically telling the story of how the scientific community became convinced that the arctic was warming, and therefore that global warming was a real phenomenon. He was a hold out but became convinced in 2003. He shares the stories of others -- what would have to happen to convince them? And then that happened, so they were convinced. It's the stories of changing minds, not the superior confidence of smug scientists trying to educate the stubborn public. It deals with the initial indications in the 1970s that the arctic might be on a long term cooling trend, and I've not seen the story told so well before. Very personable.

So I really liked it, but I'm not sure everyone will. But it's a good addition to the global warming nonfiction literature, and it's especially good for those who are inclined to trust scientists but aren't really clear on why the evidence for global warming is so convincing. This is just one piece of that story, but it's well told.

I got a free copy to review from Net Galley.

Sound, Thorough, Personable Scientific Reporting

I don't understand why popular science writing has to be hammed up. You get all of these Carl Sagan wannabes striking heroic celebrity scientist poses or gazing misty eyed at the cosmos. Meanwhile, book content is either dumbed down or so enpurpled as to be incomprehensible.

Well, that's not a problem here. Our author, Mark Serreze, entered the field as a grad student just when interest in the warming Arctic was gearing up. He took part in early field work and he grew in the profession just as the quality and depth and breadth of Arctic research grew. Serreze is modest and personable, and his book is intended to be an introduction to Arctic warming, a survey of historical developments and work to date, and a summary of what we know and don't know. It is episodic in parts, technical in other parts, and sometimes a little bit too professionally insiderish, but for the greater part the book offers a thorough and accessible history and explanation of what seems to be happening in the Arctic. It is neither over-simple nor hyper-technical and to me it fell right in that challenging just-enough-info sweet spot.

We start with Serreze's early experience measuring ice caps, and use that adventure to learn some basic technical stuff about reflection, albedo, and generally how and why ice fields and sea ice shrink and grow with the seasons. Along the way we are introduced to "temperature and atmospheric circulation, sea-ice extent, ocean circulation, marine ecosystems, terrestrial ecosystems, snow cover, permafrost, glaciers and ice caps, the Greenland ice sheet, and river discharge". These introductions are crisp, clear, illustrated by actual data, and accompanied by brief explanations of the techniques and equipment that make measurements possible.

Everything starts to speed up by the 1980's, and certainly by the mid 90's, when researchers really started to look closely at the Arctic. From this point Serreze tends to follow developments chronologically rather than topic by topic. This approach actually works, since you get a real sense of Arctic research progressing along many fronts from year to year and you get a sense of how research is connected across different disciplines, and how results are built and compared and fine tuned over time. That approach also nicely sets up the final where-do-we-go-from-here chapters at the end of the book.

In short, this was good introductory climate science and good public science, with a mild but appropriate bit of personal history and insight mixed in. I liked that recipe and found this book an entertaining and rewarding read. (Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)