Eating the Sun, by Oliver Morton
4th Estate, £25
It was a rare delight to read Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun on Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago, a part of Norway only 600 miles from the North pole. Perfect for reading because it is mostly dark and will be so until spring, when the curtain goes up on the stage where the first act of global heating is being played out. Not long ago, the floating ice was thick from here to the pole and across to Canada; last summer 1m km2 of it melted, leaving 70 per cent of the Arctic ocean unfrozen in September.
Adverse climate change makes this a most important and timely book—not just for scientists, but for anyone who can think. Oliver Morton writes so engagingly that it reads as a well-crafted biography of the earth on behalf of the plant kingdom, tracing its evolution from tiny cyanobacteria 3.5bn years ago to the giant trees of today. Unlike a botanical text, Eating the Sun reveals the intricate chemical mechanisms by which sunlight is used by plants and how the sun powers everything that matters on earth.
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