[1] On the jacket, Al Gore calls this book \u201centertaining\u201d\u2014which stunned me.\u00a0 Al, didn\u2019t you rattle our cages fifteen years ago\u2014inconveniently!\u2014to the dangers of climate change?\u00a0 So what are you thinking now?\u00a0 Should we be seeking to be entertained when reading about extreme heat, which kills almost half a million people a year worldwide\u2014twice as many as die from guns?\u00a0 Isn\u2019t such an accolade\u2026.obscene?\u00a0 But then I realized, how else is an author to communicate a deeply disturbing truth without losing the audience, without sending them to seek entertainment elsewhere?<\/p>\n
[2] This problem is familiar to Lutheran preachers. \u00a0Our core proclamation is that we are all self-centered sinners, dooming ourselves to separation from God.\u00a0 Who is likely to feel entertained by that?\u00a0 So we have a homiletic solution. Classically, we articulate law, but then answer it with gospel.\u00a0 Where would we be without the good news that we are redeemed by grace not of our own effort?\u00a0 The good news of grace is hardly entertainment, but it certainly provides us an escape from existential despair.<\/p>\n
[3] Readers of JLE therefore are well-positioned to appreciate Goodell\u2019s argument.\u00a0 He has taken on the unwelcome task of explaining what extreme heat is doing to our globe, but not as a Jonathan Edwards, lambasting sinners in the hands of an angry God.\u00a0 Rather, he tells stories to draw us in and connect us with victims as well as people working on the problem. \u00a0As the unavoidable consequences of extreme heat sink in, we might despair, but at the end he drops in a wee bit of grace in the form of hope.<\/p>\n
[4] Goodell echoes a\u00a0 classic pattern for communicating terrifying truth.\u00a0 He begins with a \u201ccautionary tale\u201d, a disturbing account of how a young California family came to perish of heat stroke while hiking only a few miles from home.\u00a0 The point, of course, is to draw in the reader, and it worked with me.\u00a0 I\u2019ve prided myself on my ability to tolerate heat while building rock dams in the Sinai and hiking around Phoenix.\u00a0 I thought my skinny frame was immune to extreme heat if simply supplied with enough water. \u00a0But Goodell shows up the fragility of such confidence.\u00a0 Extreme heat doomed this family before they realized what was going on.\u00a0 I realized it could doom me on some overambitious exposure to heat next summer.<\/p>\n
[5] Subsequent chapters also feature relatable individuals.\u00a0 This is not simply a journalistic roadtrip, for he has a problem of devastating global import to explain.\u00a0 We might ask why he thinks he is qualified to write on the subject.\u00a0 Like a good preacher, he invokes a higher authority to show where we are and where we are headed. \u00a0This higher authority is not God, of course, but science\u2014relatable scientists, to be more exact.\u00a0 Their experiences serve as focal points through which to understand rising heat in its broader trends and consequences.<\/p>\n
[6] Goodell here absorbs and adopts the mindset of a scientist, explaining how sentient (and nonsentient) creatures respond to heat by adapting, rather than simply tolerating it.\u00a0 Chapter 2 offers an array of examples, from elephants to ants.\u00a0 Even plants also adapt, as do we humans, by moving around (chapter 4).\u00a0 Such adaptations have limits, while rising levels of heat may not.\u00a0 To make this point, chapter 5 takes up heat waves and asks if there is any limit to how hot our environment might get.\u00a0 He tracks the history of scientific efforts to explain what heat is in order to show that there indeed may not be any upper limit. \u00a0By this point, a rising sense of doom already is inescapable. \u00a0The reader is being locked into the inexorable danger of a threat that cannot be evaded.<\/p>\n
[7] An appropriate response would be to put the book down.\u00a0 To avert reader burnout, Goodell retains reader interest by ranging far and wide, expanding the scope of his argument in all directions.\u00a0 He visits frontiers of heat-driven changes both visible and invisible to the ordinary eye.\u00a0 Chapter 6 shows the declining productivity of growing food and explores some adaptive strategies by farmers.\u00a0 Chapter 7 reports on the \u201cblob\u201d of overheated ocean that swam up the west coast and outlines how oceans drive the overall climate system.\u00a0 Then he turns to the threat posed by outdoor work.\u00a0 He follows a single immigrant farmworker to expose the unequal vulnerability of rich and poor (Chapter 8).\u00a0 Chapter 9 finds Goodell on a ship headed towards a melting glacier in Antarctica, while chapter 10 reports the threat of migrating mosquitoes, ticks and other bugs.\u00a0 Chapter 11 details the history of air-conditioning as a tool of inequitable heat redistribution, an invention that by now has become a global addiction. \u00a0Chapter 13 focuses on the effort by the city of Paris to redesign itself for extreme heat.<\/p>\n
[8] How do all these elements hang together?\u00a0 They are loosely coupled around one jarring theme: the rising inevitability of extreme heat.\u00a0 Don\u2019t think the absence of God from his argument gets us off the hook.\u00a0 The science he brings in cuts off any escape routes; the heat problem will simply get worse, and we are responsible.\u00a0 He interweaves the lives and work of scientists and victims to humanize this argument.\u00a0 He protects the reader from the dull thudding impact of relentless facts and statistics, but offers no escape from the growing threat.\u00a0 Indeed, Goodell caps his narrative by taking the reader on a hike through the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas, where massive reefs were destroyed in the geological blink of an eye by a surge in global vulcanism some 250 million years ago.\u00a0 We are headed towards the same fate, only our fate is anthropogenic.\u00a0 We are providing our own volcanic disruption of the earth.<\/p>\n
[9] Where is the moment of grace in all this?\u00a0 Extreme heat offers no reprieve, after all.\u00a0 At this point, unfortunately, the argument thins out into platitude.\u00a0\u00a0 Goodell\u2019s word of grace is slender at best.\u00a0 On the last page\u2014literally–he seeks to comfort us with the assurance that we are all on the same journey into extreme heat.\u00a0 The journey is rendered encouraging by the scientists and others who are \u201cfighting for the future\u201d even though we have no map to guide us.\u00a0 This tiny word of \u00a0comfort deserves more than a page. \u00a0After all, it dovetails neatly with another idea very familiar to Lutheran preachers: vocation.\u00a0 The scientists Goodell follows around clearly are motivated by some concern for the future of the planet. \u00a0For us there is a solidarity in knowing that others are devoting their work lives to understand and cope with this peril.\u00a0 \u201cWherever we may be headed, we are all on this journey together\u201d, concludes Goodell.\u00a0 This fits Lutheran theology.\u00a0 Just as we invoke God not to solve our problems but accompany us on our perilous journeys, we are comforted by the fact that others are involving themselves.\u00a0 Vocation is not simply a matter of accepting individual responsibility but recognizing that all are called. \u00a0\u00a0We indeed are not alone in this call.\u00a0 Our comprehensive and universal vocation could have used more development.<\/p>\n
[10] The book is not a failure.\u00a0 Goodell entertains us in the minimal sense by virtue of its familiar strategy.\u00a0 It is a bestseller, after all, and succeeds (as far as I am concerned) by showing some elements of a classic pattern for communicating terrifying truth.\u00a0 Goodell tells stories to draw us in, invokes the authority of science to show where we are and where we are headed, cuts off any escape from a sense of responsibility, and drops in a wee bit of grace at the very end.\u00a0 Perhaps that is the most solid encouragement we might expect given current trends: the assurance that we are all in the same fix, and that many of us, in different ways, have the capacity and will to do something about it.\u00a0 Given the prospect of relentlessly increasing heat on this planet of ours, could he offer any better news?<\/p>\n
[11] To underline the point, there is one enormous difference between classic Lutheran preaching and Goodell\u2019s argument.\u00a0 The difference concerns agency.\u00a0\u00a0 Lutherans believe that only God can redeem us\u2014that our human efforts count for nothing in terms of redemption.\u00a0 For Goodell, there is no divine rescue on the horizon; only determined human effort can keep heat from killing us.\u00a0 How sharp a wedge climate change drives between theologies of redemption and creation!\u00a0 There is no easy hope for rescue through divine intervention.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So indeed, in the end there really is nothing entertaining about the lethal heating of our planet. I suspect Al Gore would agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[1] On the jacket, Al Gore calls this book \u201centertaining\u201d\u2014which stunned me.\u00a0 Al, didn\u2019t you rattle our cages fifteen years ago\u2014inconveniently!\u2014to the dangers of climate change?\u00a0 So what are you thinking now?\u00a0 Should we be seeking to be entertained when reading about extreme heat, which kills almost half a million people a year worldwide\u2014twice as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-climate-change"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n