One of the world's most prominent advocates for taking action to halt human-caused climate change is Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania. The climatologist and geophysicist's latest book is "Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis." One might expect it to follow the pattern one so often sees in the literary sub-genre of climate change non-fiction: A breakdown of how the human-caused greenhouse gas effect is warming the planet, a bemoaning of the entrenched powers that thwart necessary reforms, and by extension, a bleak conclusion about humanity's future.
Yet "Our Fragile Moment" doesn't fall into those traps. Instead of being dire, the book dares to be optimistic: Mann argues that an Earth too hot to support life is unlikely to occur unless there is total inaction on climate change, which does not appear to be happening. Our current trajectory for warming, though dangerous and civilization-altering, is not as bad as some of the earlier worst-case scenarios that scientists warned about.
