Excerpts: “It is a book about how winters, snow, and ice shaped our world and even us–and how its coming end will change everything again, in every season” (p. 47).

“It’s impossible to fully comprehend climate change, its causes, and the coming doom it promises without knowing where your cooking gas comes from or where your garbage goes” (p. 63).

“The loss of snow affects the water supply, but it also affects the ecology in so many ways–not just forest fires but the growing season, pollination, hydropower, freshwater supply, river habitat, and myriad other effects because climate affects everything” (p. 72).

“Four degrees was more on the order of mass extinction, food and water scarcity, political instability, and sea level rise of almost thirty feet, reshaping the word’s continents. Snow would almost assuredly be gone except seasonally on a few high-altitude ranges” (p. 81).

“The project is based on one of those concepts that scientists breeze over but that make you realize (1) how little you know about the planet we live on, and (2) the ludicrous reality of living on a hunk of iron caught in an air bubble surrounded by the vacuous, black, infinite nothingness of space” (p. 127).

“The great cities of Europe were built on the shores of the Rhone, Po, Rhine, and Danube Rivers, all of which are fed by meltwater. The great metropolises and human populations of Asia sit along the Ganges, Yangtze, Syr Darya, Indus, Mekong, and Irrawaddy, all of which flow from the massive–and rapidly melting–glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau. Wherever you looked, frozen water has made our world” (p. 170-171).

“Up to 75 percent of the water used by farms and cities in the American West comes from snowmelt” (p. 182).

Fox, Porter (2021). The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World. New York: Little, Brown and Company.