”Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope” is a most welcome rarity, the recent journey of a dedicated climate scientist with an eloquent pen and a compassionate heart. This was not a physical trek but a grinding mental journey helping to assess scientific evidence and then assemble it into conclusions for the hot-off-the-press IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Masterfully, she uses a step-by-step overview of that report, expressed in lucid prose, to provide a fully up-to-date Climate Science 101 course for the reader, while also recounting her own experiences, including journal entries. In effect, this book is a window into one climate scientist’s ”real” views on the climate crisis, over and above what the necessarily conservative and careful IPCC report states. As she works, she witnesses what the reader does, our Earth burning, melting, flooding and bending under winds, and it near breaks her heart. The final section of the book then becomes her reckoning with those heartrending experiences and here the author’s prose blooms. In the end, Humanity’s Moment morphs into a Silent-Spring-like ode to humanity’s quest for justice and hope. Of all the climate crisis books you notice this year, make this one your reading priority.
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