If human­i­ty does­n’t imme­di­ate­ly reduce our emis­sions of car­bon diox­ide, methane, and oth­er cli­mate-warm­ing air pol­lu­tants, glob­al tem­per­a­tures could rise by as much as 11.5 degrees Fahren­heit by the end of the cen­tu­ry, accord­ing to the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change’s most pes­simistic fore­casts.

For some rea­son, this knowl­edge isn’t as fright­en­ing to us as the prospect of a Cold War-style apoc­a­lyp­tic ther­monu­clear exchange — in the same way that the inevitabil­i­ty of lung can­cer from smok­ing tobac­co isn’t as fright­en­ing as the idea that, hypo­thet­i­cal­ly, elec­tron­ic cig­a­rettes might have a one in 100,000 chance of blow­ing off their vaper’s head. Our risk assess­ment fac­ul­ties aren’t adapt­ed to grad­ual but cer­tain per­il the way they ought to be. So here we are.

Wit­ness Tree: Sea­sons of Change with a Cen­tu­ry-Old Oak, by Lyn­da V. Mapes

In that con­text comes Lyn­da V. Mapes’ book Wit­ness Tree. The Seat­tle Times reporter spent a year study­ing a par­tic­u­lar hun­dred-odd-year-old red oak in north-cen­tral Mass­a­chu­setts while research­ing its sur­round­ings, using it as a lens to view the effects of cli­mate change and ecol­o­gy in general.

Mapes’ inves­ti­ga­tion is phe­nom­e­nal and wide-rang­ing, all the more so because it fits it into a slim two hun­dred and ten pages of nar­ra­tive. With­in that brisk, sum­mer after­noon-length read­ing, Mapes imparts every­thing from the his­to­ry of phe­nol­o­gy, the way species respond to sea­sons, to how pho­to­syn­the­sis func­tions with­in plan cells to nine­teenth cen­tu­ry New Eng­land farm­ing prac­tices — and more still.

That engross­ing eclec­ti­cism is itself enough rea­son to rec­om­mend this book. You’re sure to learn some­thing new, along with the under­ly­ing detail behind some bit of infor­ma­tion or triv­ia you’d already heard, and feel clev­er­er when the top­ic of cli­mate dam­age comes up at the next activist gath­er­ing you’re at.

But, as a book, Wit­ness Tree ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

If we’re to judge it on its own terms — what Mapes explic­it­ly set out to do — we have to con­sid­er it to have fall­en short of its mark. Mapes is a news­pa­per reporter, and it shows in her writ­ing. Her prose is clear, con­cise, well-sourced with sol­id quotes, and engag­ing through­out. This is to her ben­e­fit, but the book suf­fers from that style, read­ing more as a series of mag­a­zine pieces than a sin­gle, coher­ent work.

The deep­er you go, the more the cen­tral premise of a spe­cif­ic tree that bears wit­ness to cli­mate sci­ence falls away.

It ends up being a book about Har­vard For­est, the team of peo­ple work­ing there, and the dif­fer­ent strate­gies we use to inves­ti­gate nature, from bor­ing for tree rings to live-stream­ing leaf growth to aer­i­al drone footage. And that’s a fine sub­ject. But Mapes set expec­ta­tions as hav­ing a big oak as its own char­ac­ter, ‘a frame of study for con­tem­pla­tion’, and through it, a fresh way to tell the sto­ry of cli­mate change that might be more per­sua­sive than what’s come before.

So when that char­ac­ter is increas­ing­ly ignored and fades into the back­ground, Mapes ends up telling a sto­ry that essen­tial­ly is an art­ful con­silience, weav­ing togeth­er many dif­fer­ent sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­plines that con­tribute to our under­stand­ing of cli­mate dam­age, but los­ing a frame that con­nects personally.

This is unlike­ly to be more per­sua­sive than An Incon­ve­nient Truth or a com­pre­hen­sive Unit­ed Nations report on what we can expect over the next one hun­dred years. That’s not a fair expec­ta­tion, though, and con­sid­er­ing trib­al­ism in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can soci­ety, may not even be possible.

Accord­ing to a Pew sur­vey tak­en last year, only forty-eight per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe the Earth is warm­ing most­ly due to human activ­i­ty, includ­ing less than a third of the par­ty in charge of all three branch­es of the fed­er­al government.

Worse, in a 2015 Yale poll, only thir­ty-six per­cent of Amer­i­cans of all polit­i­cal per­sua­sions believe cli­mate dam­age will affect them per­son­al­ly. Which is good moti­va­tion to start look­ing at ways it already is per­son­al­ly affect­ing us.

Wit­ness Tree is the finest sort of well-sourced con­silience, and if you’re already in the sci­ence-acknowl­edg­ing tribe, it may inspire you to get out a note­book (or spread­sheet) and start per­form­ing some ama­teur phe­nol­o­gy on your own back­yard and hik­ing paths.