July 19, 2022
‘In a single lifetime, humans have become a force of nature,’ Joëlle Gergis reminds us in Humanity’s Moment. As a climate scientist and lead author of the UN’s IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, she knows this better than most. Until recently, Gergis writes, she’d managed to maintain an emotional detachment from her work. But the 'bone-deep' tired days (and nights, and acutely early mornings) spent contributing to the immense IPCC process changed that. In Humanity’s Moment, she offers a rare, almost taboo, insight into the emotional experience of a climate scientist undertaking this existentially phenomenal work: ‘Looking into the void is my day job.’ Designed for general readers without science backgrounds, this book is pitched equally to business leaders, artists, teachers, parents and high-school students, or anyone seeking a clearer understanding of the latest IPCC findings. Gergis covers concepts many of us think we should understand but don’t quite grasp or details we’ve known but forgotten: the potential impacts of sea-level rise, the scale of deforestation in the Amazon, the speed at which change is occurring. She lays out our planetary situation in stark and simple terms, in sentences and statistics that demand underlining, even if they seem too terrible to bear. This all makes for raw and urgent reading, but, in the vein of Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence, the book also offers hope: its final section conjures the 'social tipping point' needed to compel political action, reminding us of the roles we can each play.
Kim Thomson is a freelance writer and editor.