Dan Rabinowitz did not set out to write an optimistic book. One of Israel’s leading researchers of the environment, he’s familiar with all the gloomy analyses and forecasts about the climate crisis. His work was going to be a depressing study of the particularly nasty future that awaits the Middle East in the decades ahead, featuring extreme climatic conditions, weak political regimes and inequality that will generate wars and the collapse of states: “The Middle East as an especially bleak microcosmos under the influence of the impact of climate change on the world,” as he puts it.