New Book on regional impacts of Climate Change
See also the book's website
The following book has just been launched - it gives a uniquely South African perspective on the problem of climate change and how it will impact on the region. Thought the following information might be of interesting to all of you:
Scorched: South Africa's Changing Climate (Wits University Press)
Leonie S Joubert
Scorched is a vivid journey through southern Africa's mesmerising landscapes as climate change sets in. It wanders through the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands to capture the last faltering calls of a rain frog that was named after the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. The author pauses for thought following an elephant stampede to consider how savannahs might shift in an altered climate. She trails the wading birds of the West Coast into the high Arctic tundra for their annual breeding season before returning to a Cape which is crisping over as drought continues to grip the province.
Another world exists somewhere beyond the global politicking of super powers and petrostates. This is the place where a solitary bee continues to pollinate the pale, demure flower of an orchid near Darling, or where the limey coral skeleton hosts its colourful algae on a Sodwana reef. These plants and animals – many of which are unique to the region – continue to do what their ancestors have done for millions of years. Yet the world is shifting its shape around them. In places it is warming and drying, elsewhere the rains come in greater deluges. Some are abandoned by the other plants and animals with which they have cohabited, as species retreat before the onslaught of rising greenhouse gases and altered weather patterns.
Scorched marvels at the world in which we live: the improbable balance of the air round us and the way it banks away the Sun's energy to keep us warm and thriving, the way life has evolved in this planetary incubator and how one species has risen up to become a potent geophysical force with the ability to shift a system which has evolved over 4 600 million years.
Scorched gives powerful local colour to a global problem. It ponders the morality of the changes humankind has wrought, and the future of life as we know it.
Leonie Joubert studied journalism and history at the universities of Rhodes and Stellenbosch. It was her enduring fascination with the human condition and its place in the natural order of things that led her to take up science writing from a small study in Wynberg, overlooking the Cape peninsula. She is the recipient of a Merit Award in the 2006 SAB Environmentalist Journalists of the Year Awards – Print Media "in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the field of environmental journalism".
1 86814 437 2
210x190, 264pp
November 2006
R180.00 / US$29.95
978 1 86814 437 2
Please send orders to:
Africa:
Book Promotions, PO Box 5, Plumstead 7800
Tel: 021 707 5700
Fax: 021 707 5795
orders@bookpro.co.za
US:
Transaction Publishers, 390 Campus Drive, Somerset, NJ 08873, USA
Tel: 732 445 1245
Fax: 732 748 9801
http://www.transactionpub.com/
UK / Europe:
The Eurospan Group
Tel: +44 207 845 0803
Fax: +44 207 379 3313
http://www.eurospanonline.com/
