For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard has investigated global warming for outlets including the New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and the Nation. But the full truth did not hit home until he became a father and, soon thereafter, learned that climate change had already arrived―a century earlier than forecast―with impacts bound to worsen for decades to come.  Hertsgaard’s daughter Chiara, now five years old, is part of what he has dubbed “Generation Hot”–the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption.

HOT is a father’s cry against climate change, but most of the book focuses on solutions, offering a deeply reported blueprint for how all of us―as parents, communities, companies and countries―can navigate this unavoidable new era.  Combining reporting from across the nation and around the world with personal reflections on his daughter’s future, Hertsgaard provides “pictures” of what is expected over the next fifty years: Chicago’s climate transformed to resemble Houston’s; dwindling water supplies and crop yields at home and abroad; the redesign of New York and other cities against mega-storms and sea-level rise. Above all, he shows who is taking wise, creative precautions. For in the end, HOT is a book about how we’ll survive.

MARK HERTSGAARD, called “one of America’s finest reporters” by Barbara Ehrenreich, is the author of five previous books that have been translated into sixteen languages, including On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency and Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future.

Mark Hertsgaard and the Climate Cranks from Mark Hertsgaard on Vimeo.