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  1. Feb 2021
    1. Under a White Sky is one of several major books on warming being published this winter, presumably timed to the inauguration of a new climate-conscious president. But unlike Michael Mann’s The New Climate War or Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, it marks a notable turn in perspective for its author. Kolbert is, by temperament and intellectual inclination, a preservationist and a conservationist. Her first two climate books, The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes From a Catastrophe, were works of explicit lamentation and implicit exhortation. The new book begins from the premise that the world is already past a point of no return: “Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future,” she writes. The book’s key question is: What innovations will we jerry-rig, and what risky interventions will we conscience, as we slide down the precipice? Her ambivalent response is “If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control.”

      《白色天空下》是今年冬天出版的几本关于气候变暖的主要书籍之一,大概是为了配合具有气候意识的新总统的就职典礼。但与迈克尔·曼的《新气候战争》(The New Climate War)或比尔·盖茨的《如何避免气候灾难》(How to Avoid a Climate Disaster)不同的是,这本书标志着作者的观点发生了显著转变。从气质和知识倾向来看,科尔伯特是一个保护主义者和自然资源保护主义者。她的前两本气候书《第六次大灭绝》和《灾难中的田野笔记》,都是明确悲叹和含蓄劝诫的作品。新书的出发点是,世界已经过了一个无法回头的时刻:"人类正在创造一个无法模拟的气候,无法模拟的生态系统,一个完全无法模拟的未来,"她写道。这本书的关键问题是:当我们滑下悬崖的时候,我们会偷工减料地进行什么样的创新,我们的良心会受到什么样的危险干预?她矛盾的回答是:“如果要解决控制的问题,那就是更多的控制。”