Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008. 438 pages. ISBN-10: 0374166854

From the book jacket: "Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world's middle class through globalization have produced a planet that is 'hot, flat, and crowded.' ...In just a few years, it will be too late to fix things - unless the United States steps up now and takes the lead in a worldwide effort to replace our wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy, energy efficiency and conservation that Friedman calls Code Green."

The meeting to discuss this book was held shortly after two record-setting snowstorms in the Mid-Atlantic region. Were these storms evidence against global warming and climate change? There is an answer in the book:

As more people encounter climate change, more of them are also coming to understand that it is not just some cuddly-sounding phenomenon called "global warming." "Oh, well, things will just get a little warmer, how bad can that be - especially if you're from Minnesota, like me?" It is, instead, going to be "global weirding."

Global weirding is a term used by Hunter Lovins, cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, to explain to people that the rise in global average temperature (global warming) is actually going to trigger all sorts of unusual weather events - from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places to heavier snows in others, to more violent storms, more intense flooding, downpours, forest fires, and species loss in still others. The weather is going to get weird.

- Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, page 133.

To learn more about this book, visit:
http://us.macmillan.com/hotflatandcrowded
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/

Photo: Book Club members met at the Arboretum in February 2010 to discuss Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded. From left: Sylvan Kaufman, Gayle Jayne, Margie Steffens, Jane Chambers, Julianna Pax, Beverly Gemmill, Carol Jelich, and Walt Gilefski. Also attending but not pictured: Marilyn Hale, Zaida Wing.