Eugene Linden Wins Prestigious Book Award

(from The Hudson Independent)

The Coun­cil of the Amer­i­can Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal So­ci­ety (AMS) has voted to award Irv­ing­ton res­i­dent Eu­gene Lin­den The Louis J. Bat­tan Au­thor’s Award – Adult.  The ti­tle of the book is Fire and Flood: A Peo­ple’s His­tory of Cli­mate Change, from 1979 to the Pre­sent.

Fire and Flood is Lin­den’s eleventh book. A pre­vi­ous work on cli­mate change, Winds of Change: Cli­mate, Weather, and the De­struc­tion of Civl­liza­tions, won the Grantham Prize’s Award of Spe­cial Merit.

A for­mer se­nior writer for TIME Mag­a­zine, where he wrote about na­ture, sci­ence, and hu­man­i­ty’s re­la­tion­ship to the nat­ural world, Lin­den has con­tin­ued to write for a wide range of mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers. He has also served on the board of sev­eral com­pa­nies and non-prof­its. For 15 years, he served as Chief In­vest­ment Strate­gist for Ben­nett Man­age­ment, a fam­ily of in­vest­ment funds.

A for­mal pre­sen­ta­tion of the award will take place at the 104th AMS An­nual Meet­ing to be held in Bal­ti­more from Jan­u­ary 21^st to Feb­ru­ary 1^st, 2024.

From the Award citation:
The American Meteorological Society names Fire and Flood its book of the year for 2023, awarding it the Louis J Batton Author’s Award.

“Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.

Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag farther still; and, arguably, most importantly, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective monied climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism’s response has been sadly predictable.”