Word: polarizer
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Your best pick-up line: How much does a polar bear weigh...
Your best pick-up line: “How much does a Polar Bear weigh?”...or, wait, “No Shakespeare poem could ever capture your beauty...
...even when Beard is invited on a trip to the Norwegian Arctic with a boat full of self-important artists and scientists going north to see global warming in action. The journey is hilarious: Beard suffers frostbite in a rather uncomfortable place and is very nearly eaten by a polar bear. But even better is the way McEwan deftly contrasts the high ideals of the travelers - who call for a new, greener way of life - with their unacknowledged selfishness. The ship's boot room, where people load and unload their polar gear, and which steadily descends into chaos, becomes...
...Beard's dismissal of global warming changes when his unhappy home - his current wife is cheating on him in response to his half-dozen extramarital affairs - and his stalled work collide on the full-length polar-bear rug in his living room. (Updating Chekhov: If the author of a climate-change novel shows you a polar-bear rug in the first act, you can be sure it will bare its teeth in the next one.) Quite suddenly, Beard discovers what he believes is the solution to the problem of climate change: artificial photosynthesis, harnessing sunlight to split water and yield...
Reports about the melting ice caps are distressing, but for the most part climate change remains abstract. The poor polar bear has been trotted out as the tangible face of global warming so often that we're beginning to see "polar bear fatigue." How about bringing the effects of Arctic melt close to home, as in what it will cost? A new study does just that, and the results are alarming, not just for Arctic dwellers but for all of us. According to lead author Eban Goodstein, Ph.D., over the next 40 years Arctic ice melt will take an economic...