Destination: Doom
China survives, mostly. For those of you on the edge of your seat wanting to know how the global climate crisis turns out, that’s the short answer. But to skip to the end would be missing the point of Professor Naomi Oreskes’ latest book, a novella called “The Collapse of Western Civilization.” Because, though the book is fictional, it is fact-based, and the lessons it holds lie not in the fanciful outcome but in how the world gets there. And that part of the story, unfortunately, is quite serious. In crafting their cautionary tale, Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway of the California Institute of Technology relied heavily on scientific predictions of what is likely to happen by the turn of the century should the world not pick up the pace in responding to climate change. Rising seas, killer heat waves, and lengthy droughts all take their toll in the book, published in July by the...