Review: Imaginative, but rather weak
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 18, 2011
In this picture of our world deep in global warming crisis, Powell does a relatively good job at imagining consequences of worst-case "business as usual" scenario combined with worst case reactions to crisis everywhere (everybody reacts by going to war; sea defenses don't work anywhere, not even in Holland; New York does not as much as close tunnels and subway with storm surges advancing etc). Some of feedback mechanisms worsening the situation he invents are rather ingenious - for example, population explosion of tree-infesting insects.This work could be intended as a piece of literature or as a dire warning. The first does not quite work because, as other reviewers noted, all of the people "interviewed" speak in the same flat, journalist voice. If the author dispensed with "oral history" pretense and merely wrote a chapter in a future history book, it would function better.As a warning it will not work due to its insistence of worst-case scenarios everywhere. Instead, it will serve to reinforce belief by morons who listen to and vote for "skeptic" politicians flush with oil and coal lobby contribution money that Anthropogenic Climate Change is "laughable liberal conspiracy". I think that a more realistic work likeEarthwill do much more to convince those still straddling the fence.