Stephan Faris

Stephan Faris covers climate change for GlobalPost and is the author of Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley.

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Stephan Faris's Notebook:

March 12, 2009 10:08 ET

The "Great Disruption"

In his New York Times column earlier this week, Thomas Friedman asks some disturbing questions about our current economic woes:

"What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”"

Friedman is careful to frame his column — which has been getting a lot of web traffic and comments — as ultimately optimistic. But he relies on a premise that I think most readers will find rather surprising and Casssandra-ish: that we’re overdrawing on the Earth’s resources, much in the way we’ve overdrawn on our economic assets.

Friedman is evolving as a pundit from a free-market flat-earther to somebody who is obviously becoming increasingly alarmed by the state of the world. His column this week is very much an illustration of how it's no longer possible to delve into our relationship with the global environment without drawing conclusions that make you seem like a raving fanatic to those who have yet to delve.

As a culture, there is something dysfunctional about our attention span on this issue. The information is all there. But I guess denial is so much easier.

(Stephan Faris covers the environment for GlobalPost. His new book, Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley, will be excerpted soon at GlobalPost.)

February 13, 2009 13:12 ET | Updated: March 25, 2009 11:38 ET

Who or what is to blame for bushfire tragedy in Australia?

The skies over Melbourne are full of smoke. The setting sun glows red against the gray. I haven't been to the towns where bushfires have killed more than 180 people. I'm pretty sure I don't want to.

It's not a subject you can escape. The papers are full of pictures and accounts. One striking photograph in The Age show a newly married couple who had braved the fires to go through with their ceremony. They face the camera as flames devour the hills behind them.

I spent the day at the Melbourne studios of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, talking about my book on the consequences of climate change with radio stations across the continent.

Again and again, the question repeated itself: Can we confidently attribute the fatal fires to climate change?

My answer: No. But since a warming world will mean more hotter days of the type that laid the kindling for the inferno, the fires offer us a glimpse into the future. As signposts in the road we're headed down, they offer us a chance to consider if this is really the direction we want to choose.

Tomorrow, I give a talk on climate change at Melbourne's Writers at the Convent. My wife was planning to take our four-year-old son to see the kangaroos at an animal sanctuary just outside Melbourne. She can't. The fires are threatening the area. The sanctuary is closed until further notice.

January 20, 2009 06:13 ET

Hello World

Hi everybody,

I'm looking foward to covering climate change and the environment for Global Post. It's an exciting time for me. In addition to starting here, I've just published a book on the consequences of climate change: Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley. 

Born from an article in The Atlantic exploring the links between global warming and the conflict in Darfur, it's an effort to take readers around the world looking at how climate change is changing the way we live. In addition to revisiting Sudan, where I weave in some early reporting on the conflict I did for Time Magazine, I look at rougher waters off the Gulf Coast, at immigration pressures in Europe, at the spread of disease in Brazil and the American Southwest, at the changing taste of wine in Napa Valley, and the shifting geopolitics of the Arctic, and at the potential for catastrophe in South Asia.

Happily, the early reviews are in and they're ... very complimentary!

Fred Pearce, writing in Orion Magazine says

Well worth the carbon footprint of its publication … The most perceptive [book] so far about [climate change’s] growing place in our daily lives, our iconography, and, sometimes, our paranoias.

Read the whole thing here.

In the American Prospect, Chris Mooney, author of Storm World, does a good job of laying out what the book is about. On Mooney’s website, he also writes: 

Stephan Faris’s Forecast is a journalistic take on global warming, the kind of book I might have liked to write myself with a better travel budget. It’s colorful, writerly, dispatched from the front lines. The key theme: In less stable parts of the world, global warming is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It can tip fragile societies over the edge. And that’s already happening.

Those interested in having a taste should check out the Top 10 list I did for Scientific American.

You can follow Forecast's progress at www.stephanfaris.com, on Facebook, or — of course — here!