Gaia's Revenge

P. H. Liotta is Executive Director of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy in Newport, Rhode Island, and Tenured Professor of Humanities at Salve Regina University. As a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he shares in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He is the author of seventeen books.Allan W. Shearer is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey. His work focuses on the development and use of scenarios for environmental planning and management decisions.

Liotta and Shearer make compelling cases that offer a broad examination of the meaning of climate change and global warming; within that framework, they maintain a strategic perspective on the implications of environmental effects on security in its broadest sense. Several scenarios are created from the premise above in seven chapters that include rapid climate change; careful examination of security with a focus on the relationship between threats and vulnerabilities; principles behind creating and using scenarios; overview of several methods drawn from the larger literatures of futures and security studies that offer more focused images of the future relative to the context of climate change and societal needs; and finally, a summation that draws all this material together and provides some directions for further thought. This reviewer considers this a factual and unbiased work that reminds us how much remains to be done. Two appendixes explain the abrupt climate change scenario and implications for the US, and a joint science academies statement highlights a global response to climate change. Select bibliography; four-page index. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.