Lynas,M. (2004) High Tide: News From A Warming World. London: Flamingo. 341pp.
This essay continues my series of monthly posts in which I select one ‘climate’ book to highlight and review from one of the 44 years of my professional career in climate research (starting with 1984, my first year of academic employment). The series will end in September 2027, the month in which I shall retire. See here for more information about the rational for this series, and the criteria I have used in selecting my highlighted books.
This ‘2004 essay’ can be download as a pdf.

During the final two decades of the twentieth century, much studying, writing and talking about the changing climate—and about the influence of human actions upon the climate—emphasised scientific theory, evidence, interpretation, and projections. For example, the IPCC, established in 1988, was tasked to reach a sufficiently strong consensus about the scientific evidence so as, in the words of the IPCC’s founding Co-Chair Sir John Houghton, “to provide the necessary firm scientific foundation for the forthcoming discussions and negotiations on the appropriate strategy for response and action regarding the issue of climate change”.[1] And yet most people living today—and nearly all people living in the past—register and interpret their experiences of climate, and the variations in expected weather this brings about, not through scientific evidence but through their primary senses; and through the impacts these changes have on their everyday lives.
In an article written in 2013, the Canadian anthropologist Peter Rudiak-Gould made the important distinction between what he called climate change ‘invisibilists’ and ‘visibilists’.[2] The ‘invisibilists’ are those who believe that discerning human-induced climate change relies upon the abstractions of scientific inquiry and the formal scientific methods of measuring and detecting changes in climate, and upon the statistical attribution of those changes to human actions. The ‘visibilists’, on the other hand, are those who rely on their own lived experiences and sensations of changes in their climatic environments that they deem to be ‘unusual’ or ‘abnormal’. Rather than believing in climate change because of the scientific consensus of the IPCC, ‘visibilists’ are more likely to say ‘we have seen it with our own eyes’. Some have referred to such individuals and communities as “front-line witnesses” of climate change.
One of the first books to approach the reporting and communication of climate change through this ‘visibilist’ lens was Mark Lynas’ High Tide: News From A Warming World, and I have therefore selected it my 2004 Climate Book of the Year.[3] ‘High Tide’ introduced a new genre of climate journalism, reporting and advocacy. Science journalists in the 1970s and 1980s—such as John Gribbin and Fred Pearce—had offered popular accounts for public audiences of the on-going scientific search for evidence of human-caused climate change. And in the 1990s, journalists such as Ross Gelbspan and campaigners such as Jeremy Leggett wrote books about the political battles, diplomatic struggles, and environmental campaigns concerning climate change that emerged during that decade.
In ‘High Tide’, Lynas was doing something different. He combined a travelogue, popular science, and climate advocacy to turn the science, politics and economics of climate change into a first-hand account of the felt effects of a changing climate on places and on people’s lives around the world. One might say he gave voice to Rudiak-Gould’s “visibilist” account of climate change. Between 2001 and 2003, Lynas, in his late 20s, embarked on a worldwide tour of five continents. Along with travelling companions Karen Robinson, Franny Armstrong and Tim Helweg-Larsen, he visited the countries of Tuvalu and Vanuatu in the Pacific, Australia, China, Mongolia, the United States—Alaska and North Carolina—and Peru, “searching for the fingerprints of global warming” [p.xxv]. The only equivalent extended book in this genre at the time was the collection of different (American) journalists’ writings from around the world, brought together that same year by the editor of E/The Environmental Magazine, Jim Motavalli, in ‘Feeling the Heat: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Change’.[4]
Lynas admitted he didn’t know much about global warming when he started out. “I knew only some of the basic facts”, he wrote, but found the climate science he read about “all a bit too abstract and difficult to connect to my everyday reality” [pp.xx-xxi]. Former UK Environment Minister—and still Member of Parliament—Michael Meacher succinctly summarised the book in his review, “Mark Lynas has abandoned the scientific disputes and the political wrangling, and spent three years travelling to find out from ordinary people how massive changes to the climate are devastating their lives, not in the future, but now.”
Lynas concluded his tour du monde with motivational advocacy. Framing the politics of climate change as a battle, he says that “no-one can be neutral in the struggle that lies ahead” [p.286]. His modest manifesto offered five suggestions for “a way out of this crisis together”, namely: to ratify the Kyoto Protocol; to sign up to the ‘contraction-and-convergence’ framework; to stop all new oil, coal and gas exploration; to reduce one’s personal carbon emissions; and to keep repeating the climate change message, which seemed to be that, on the one hand, “climate change is a very simple issue”, but on the other—and surely contradictorily—that “we all have to change the way we live [p.294; 296].
‘High Tide’ won The Guardian newspaper’s ‘First Book Award’ in 2004, and was widely praised in reviews in mainstream media. Naomi Klein was effusive with her praise: “Go with him on this breathtaking, beautifully told journey—to island nations being engulfed by rising tides, to towns swallowed by encroaching desert, to glaciers melting into oceans—and I promise that you will come back changed, determined to alter the course of history”. The Independent newspaper elevated Lynas’ climate journalism even higher: “There will be many more books like ‘High Tide’, but this will be remembered as the first; it’ll be the one with the original vision, not unworthy of comparison with Orwell and certainly the breaker of new ground.”
In my review of ‘High Tide’, written in October 2004 for the Times Higher Educational Supplement, I was more sparing with praise, although recognising it as “a clever piece of environmental journalism”.[5] The idea behind the book was a good one,
… to paint the basic scientific conclusions of the IPCC reports about our warming world onto a more colourful and human canvas using a travelogue format … Lynas starts his personal search for evidence of global warming during the autumn of 2000 in his own (flooded) backyard here in the UK … [and] his odyssey takes him to Alaska, Tuvalu in the Pacific, northern China, North Carolina and Peru. In the process he ‘blows 20 years of his own personal carbon budget’ [p.293] on air flights and ends up at the international climate conference in The Hague in July 2001 when the Bush Administration so dramatically pulled out of the process of the Kyoto Protocol.
But I also noted that the book was unsatisfying for a number of reasons. Belying my ‘invisibilist’ bias at the time, I felt that “his attempts to add substance and colour to what science is telling us often resulted in melodrama and hype.” The other problem with ‘High Tide’ was that I felt it was too self-conscious and guilt-ridden. “Lynas is clearly grappling with his own carbon footprint”, I wrote, “… and he never resolves this dilemma satisfactorily. If all of us were to experience Tuvalu in the way he did—‘one of those magical places of longing that can never be regained’—we would double the world’s carbon emissions.”
The following year, I also found cause to challenge Lynas’ newly found public voice on climate change. In June 2005, he wrote an op-ed for New Scientist magazine, criticising “the scientific community” for its lack of climate change advocacy. Climate scientists, he wrote, “were being intimidated into [political and policy] neutrality by environmentalism’s powerful opponents”. I found his views inconsistent. On the one hand, Lynas argued, correctly in my view—and in keeping with ‘High Tide’s foregrounding of the voices of ‘front-line witnesses’—that “Climate change is not a scientific issue. No, really, I’m serious. It is far more important than that. It forces us to make fundamental choices about our most basic belief systems.” With this I fully agreed. And yet on the other hand, Lynas elevated the ethical and political authority of scientists when it came to choosing between different belief systems.
In a following issue of New Scientist I challenged Lynas’ ‘science-first’ framing of climate change.[6] I disagreed with his claim that climate scientists were not fulfilling their “moral responsibility” to help solve climate change, and that they were being intimidated into silence. I pointed out that scientists are not elected to run national governments or to adjudicate between different sets of political or ethical values. “It is as though Lynas, and some other frantic environmentalists”, I wrote, “having in turn blamed George Bush, the UK government, the multinational corporations, and the recalcitrant public for lack of appropriate response to climate change, have now turned on climate scientists and made them the scapegoat for behavioural, social and political inertia.”
Notwithstanding its youthful enthusiasm and optimistic rendering of what needed to change to find a solution to climate change, ‘High Tide’ was a pioneering book. In later years journalistic writers such as Elizabeth Kolbert, McKenzie Funk and Gaia Vince have trodden in some of Lynas’s footsteps.[7] They have sought out the voices and views of people in diverse places who have experienced climate change or, in Funk’s case, who have found new business opportunities arising from the challenges of adapting to or mitigating the magnitude of climate change. Lynas himself went on to write a further book about climate change, ‘Six Degrees: Our Future On A Hotter Planet’, which in 2008 won the Royal Society’s ‘Science Book of the Year.’[8]
And yet over the subsequent 20 years, Lynas’s thinking about climate change had itself changed. As a young activist in the 1990s, Lynas had lost faith that “’progress worked” [p.xxii], and he campaigned against new roads, against the loss of ancient woodland, and against the destruction of heritage. This youthful environmental and anti-technology activism, very evident in ‘High Tide’, had by 2010 evolved into an embrace of nuclear energy, genetically modified foods, and solar geoengineering as available technologies for mitigating and adapting to climate change. These were ideas he developed in his 2011 book ‘The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans’.[9] The following year Lynas was awarded a Paradigm Award by the California-based Breakthrough Institute for his commitment to “collective commitment to dialogue and understanding about ‘wicked problems’ about whose nature we disagree”, and in 2015 he signed ‘The Ecomodernist Manifesto’, aligning himself with its belief in the possibility of a ‘good Anthropocene’ fuelled by technological innovation.
Most recently Lynas has written about the climatic dangers of nuclear war.[10] There are existing and imaginable technologies for limiting future warming, and for adapting to it, he argues now. But he believes a major exchange of nuclear weapons between antagonistic powers—and the resulting ‘nuclear winter’—would destroy civilization beyond repair within months or years. For the later Lynas, it is nuclear war, not climate change, which is the true existential threat to humanity. This is an interesting return to the nuclear winter debates of the early 1980s—as captured in my review of Owen Greene’s 1985 book ‘Nuclear Winter’—and a surprising destination for the youthful author of 2004’s ‘High Tide’ .
© Mike Hulme, October 2025
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Other significant books published in 2004
Ehrlich,G. (2004) The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold. New York: Pantheon Books. 200pp.

Early in the new century, the prospect of a warming climate was engaging new cohorts of writers, journalists and poets. The idea of climate being re-shaped by human agency began to be given new cultural expression through visual art, poetry, stage drama, film and fiction. One of these writers was the experienced American travel journalist, poet and essayist, Gretel Ehrlich. In The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold, Ehrlich celebrates her love of winter—and ice. She expresses her fear that the first victim of global warming will be this icy season she so loves: “It is not unreasonable to think that a whole season can become extinct, a least for a time” [p.47].
The book had it origins in a phone call Ehrlich received from her agent whilst living on a tent on a glacial moraine in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. Would she write a book about “winter and climate change, about what would happen if we became ‘deseasoned’, if winter disappeared as a result of global warming?” [p.xi]. Yes, she would, she replied. To inspire her musing on the future of ice, Ehrlich travels alone—other than with her dog—to remote places of the northern and southern ends of the Earth: to Svalbard, Greenland and Tierra del Fuego—although avoiding Antarctica, the largest repository of ice in the world.
‘The Future of Ice’ is not about the science behind melting ice, nor is it an eye-witness inventory of climate warming’s effects of the icy worlds Ehrlich travels to. It is a lyrical meditation, an elegy, on the sensation of deep cold and its potential demise through global warming. As one reviewer wrote, ‘The Future of Ice’ is about “loneliness and the relentless circling of the snowed-in mind; the rumbling of a glacier as its azure ice crumbles away; the whistling, ululating calls of the bearded seal”. Ehrlich’s writing here is one of the early examples of impressionistic encounters with the disappearing world of ice, which over the subsequent twenty years has developed into a rich cultural trope, as seen in David Buckland’s ‘Cape Farewell’ project (which started in 2001) and Dehlia Hannah’s ambitious compendium ‘A Year Without a Winter’ (Columbia University Press, 2018).
Speth,J.G. (2004) Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment – A Citizen’s Agenda for Action. Yale, CT: Yale University Press. 299pp.

Russia and Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2004, thus bringing the treaty into effect on 16 February 2005, just over seven years after it had been negotiated in Kyoto in December 1997. Yet at this very moment when politicians, scientists, environmentalists and campaigners were lauding this achievement, the veteran American environmental lawyer and advocate James Gustave (‘Gus’) Speth (b.1942) was making a contrary argument. In ‘Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment – A Citizen’s Agenda for Action’, Speth developed the case that rather than rely on international environmental treaties to arrest climate change, an empowered “civil society must take the helm” [p.xii].
Speth had 30 years of professional experience in the environmental NGO sector behind him. He had co-founded both the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in the United States, had advised both Presidents Carter and Clinton, and in 2002 had been awarded the Blue Planet Prize. But in ‘Red Sky’ Speth warned that the approach being taken to address global climate change was doomed to failure. In the Preface he wrote, “The current system of international efforts to help the environment simply isn’t working. The design makes sure it won’t work, and the statistics keep getting worse” [p.xii]. After offering a diagnosis of the failings of environmental governance worldwide, he makes a convincing presentation of ten drivers of environmental deterioration, including the values and ethics of ‘our’ (at least American) culture.
I reviewed Speth’s book for the Times Higher Educational Supplement in 2004, noting his final rallying call for a new ethos of citizenship which would change the way each of us sees ourselves in relation to the planet. “My only problem with Speth”, I went on to say, “is whether it is actually the USA who holds the key to the Earth’s future. The book seems implicitly to think so, but one suspects that this coming century will not only see further critical transformation of the Earth’s sustaining powers, but also surprising shifts in the balance of geopolitical power.” And in 2024, 20 years after publication of ‘Red Sky’, Speth offered his own reflections on the continued relevance of the book. “It would be perverse to find pleasure in saying I was right, [but my] warnings in 2004 that we were on the wrong track … have gone largely unheeded. We find ourselves today on the cusp of a ruined planet … I pointed out back then that ‘the climate convention is not protecting climate’ and was unlikely to do much in the future … The climate treaty Conferences of the Parties have not been a complete waste of time, but they have surely wasted a lot of time, decades of it.”
[1] p. vi in: IPCC (1990) Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment. Houghton,J.T., Jenkins,G.J. and Ephraums,J.J. (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 364pp.
[2] Rudiak-Gould,P. (2013) ‘We have seen it with our own eyes’: why we disagree about climate change visibility. Weather, Climate & Society. 5(2): 120-132.
[3] The book was re-issued later in 2004, or early 2005, with a different sub-title, ‘High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing our Planet’ (HarperPerennial, 2005)
[4] Motavalli,J. (ed.) (2004) Feeling the Heat: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Change. New York: Routledge. 207pp.
[5] Hulme,M. (2004) Save the world without being an eco-bore. Times Higher Educational Supplement. 22 October.
[6] Lynas,M. (2005) Get off the fence. New Scientist. 22 June. Vol.186: 25; and Hulme,M. (2005) Scientists have spoken. New Scientist. 13 July.
[7] Kolbert,E. (2006) Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Climate Change – Is Time Running Out? London: Bloomsbury Press; Funk,M. (2013) Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming. New York: Penguin Press; Vince,G. (2022) Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval. London: Allen Lane.
[8] Lynas,M. (2007) Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. London: Fourth Estate. This was later largely re-written as Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, 2020).
[9] Lynas,M. (2011) The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save The Planet. Fourth Estate. See also: Lynas,M. (2013) Nuclear 2.0: Why a Green Future Needs Nuclear Power. UIT Cambridge; and Lynas,M. (2018) Seeds of Science: Why We Got It So Wrong on GMOs. London: Bloomsbury.
[10] Lynas,M. (2025) Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It. London: Bloomsbury.