Blaze Island

A climate scientist whose career was destroyed by climate change deniers, Milan Wells has fled to a remote island with his daughter, desperate to protect her from the world's worsening weather.

A Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake, its outer wings brushing over tiny Blaze Island. During this wild night, a stranger washes up on the doorstep of the isolated house where Wells lives with his daughter Miranda.

Seemingly safe in her father's realm, Miranda walks the island's rocky shores, helping her father with his daily weather records. But the stranger's arrival breaks open Miranda's world, stirs up memories of events of long ago and compels her to wonder what her father is up to with his mysterious weather experiments. In the aftermath of the storm, she finds herself in a world altered so quickly that she hardly knows what has happened or what the unpredictable future will bring. (Publisher)

Bremen FMS Book Club: 30 Dec 2020 (virtual meeting)

Some issues and further reading discussed:

We talked about climate scientists who have been driven to become activists--something of an oxymoron for a scientist! One example is Peter Kalmus, who went off the grid with his family and has written about this experience. His twitter handle is @ClimateHuman. His book about the transformation, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution is available from bookstores or can be read online on his website.
Michael Mann is the geophysicist at Penn State University responsible for the so-called “hockey stick” graph in 1999 that was so controversial in the U.S. He turned to science communication and outright activism after that experience and has written widely about it, most recently in his 2021 book The New Climate War which documents the thirty year history of the oil companies’ public misinformation campaign in the U.S.--the same one that the geochemist Tina is confronted with in 1984 in Gaines’s 2001 novel Carbon Dreams, which the book club discussed in 2016. His twitter handle is @MichaelEMann

Thinking of how quickly a global research effort has produced viable vaccines for the pandemic, Heather asked whether we see hope for mediating climate change. The meteorologist, journalist, and activist Eric Holthaus has recently written a book on the topic: The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming. His twitter handle is @EricHolthaus

The Project Drawdown website also assembles information on climate change “solutions” research.

And finally, here is a Boston Review book essay that discusses climate change as a market opportunity…