Author: Bryan Walker

The Weather Makers

The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change

When I set out to establish my understanding of the science of climate change Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change was the next book I read after Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes. Kolbert provides a most valuable introduction, but Flannery immerses the reader in the full range of the science and the political reaction to it.  Few stones are left unturned.  He is a gifted communicator with an instinct for clarity.  Science pervades the book, but always explained in terms that the lay person can follow and placed in narratives high in reader interest.

A lot has happened in climate science since the book was published in 2005.  How does it stand up four years later?  I started my rereading for this review with that question in mind. But not for long. It was soon apparent that Flannery’s material remains relevant and illuminating. Partly because he understood the direction in which the science was moving and often anticipates what was to come. The West Antarctic ice sheet, for example, is pointed to as perhaps vulnerable, and the possibility of more rapid sea level rise than anticipated is canvassed. The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC hadn’t yet appeared when he was writing, but he warns that the modus operandi of the IPCC almost guarantees reports confined to the lowest common denominator.

Flannery is an Australian environmentalist, and a very prominent one, having been named Australian of the Year in 2007. His scientific work has been in the fields of mammalogy and paeontology, not climate. Ecology has been a prominent concern for some years, as readers of his earlier book The Future Eaters will recall. He writes that for years he resisted the impulse to devote research time to climate change, being busy with other things and preferring to wait and see. But by 2001 he realised he had to learn more and by 2004 his interest had turned to anxiety.  The great changes under way in the atmosphere, still something many were unaware of, presaged serious problems ahead. The issue, he came to see, would dwarf all the other issues combined.

He takes a broadly Gaian approach because it sees everything on earth as being intimately connected to everything else and because he considers reductionist world views have brought the present state of climate change upon us. Thus armed he leads the reader through the range of “Gaia’s tools” which bear on climate change, the “great aerial ocean”, the carbon cycle, the Milankovich cycles, abrupt climate changes, and many more. On the power and seduction of coal he remarks: “the past is a truly capacious land, whose stored riches are fabulous when compared with the meagre daily ration of solar radiation we receive.”

How has life on Earth already been affected by the warming so far experienced? Among the many phenomena Flannery describes are the observed poleward movement of species, changes in the food chain in Antarctica, the effects of warming for Arctic wildlife and the tundra, the bleaching of coral reefs, the extinction of the golden toad of Costa Rica, changes in rainfall in America’s west and Australia’s south, extreme weather events and rising sea level. “So swift have been the changes in ice plain science, and so great is the inertia of the oceanic juggernaut, that climate scientists are now debating whether humans have already tripped the switch that will create an ice-free Earth.”

He considers many predictions for the future. Global circulation models are described along with the possible range of temperature rise in response to CO2 levels. He outlines the catastrophic effects temperature rise will have on biodiversity in the tropical rainforests of north-eastern Queensland. “The impending destruction of Australia’s wet tropics rainforest is a biological disaster on the horizon, and the generation held responsible will be cursed by those who come after.”  On extinctions worldwide he concludes that at least one in five living things on the planet is committed to extinction by existing levels of greenhouse gases; business-as-usual would likely result in three of five not being with us by the end of the century.  Even deep-sea fishes are under threat of warming. He examines three of the possible main tipping points, the collapse of the Gulf Stream, the collapse of the Amazon rainforests, and methane release from the sea floor and sees rainforest collapse as the most threatening this century. Half a century of business-as-usual would make inevitable the collapse of civilisation due to climate change.

The rest of the book addresses human responses to the challenge, both political and technological. He draws some encouragement from the way CFCs were phased out in response to the threat of ozone depletion, but acknowledges the deep intransigence displayed by some industries and their political allies where climate change is concerned. Adequate technological solutions to the problem are available. Contraction and convergence is the democratic, transparent and simple form of international agreement that could be the way forward after Kyoto.

Rereading The Weather Makers is a reminder of how solidly established the basic science of climate change has been for some years now. A reminder, too, that the effects of the CO2 already in the atmosphere are still working their way slowly through the system. And a reminder of how accessible all this information has been to the lay public, carrying with it the concomitant sad reminder that many in public life who are perfectly capable of understanding the science have excused themselves the responsibility.

Australia is fortunate to have Flannery as a prominent citizen. He hasn’t stopped with his book. He continues to pursue the issue of climate change in the public arena. When the book was written there was still a feeling that though consequences were building they were still some distance off. If that provided any comfort it doesn’t any more. The Arctic sea ice melting alone has put paid to that. These days Flannery’s message is “now or never”. (I hope to review his book of that title when it is published in coming months.)  In this October 2008 interview you can hear him explain the urgency that is now upon us and discuss the actions that must be taken. The compass and intellectual depth of his thinking is very apparent in his conversation with Robert Manne. May he carry weight at the political levels where crucial decisions must now be made.

Afterword:

For the sake of completeness I will mention here that the third book of the trio which formed my introduction to the science of climate change was James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia. I won’t be reviewing it on Hot Topic as I have since reviewed his later book The Vanishing Face of Gaia here.  But in the earlier book Lovelock seemed to me to leave open hopeful possibilities of which we hear much less from him these days. I’ll repeat here the final paragraph of a short review I did for the Waikato Times back then:

The book is compelling reading, packed with intelligent insights, written in elegant and clear prose. Despair and hope jostle each other disconcertingly through its pages and Lovelock doesn’t declare for either. His prime concern is to warn us of the seriousness of the danger we have put ourselves in, though the reader may take some solace from the fact that he is also prepared to entertain possible ways of lessening the perils if only we will accept that the earth is not ours to do with as we will.

It is interesting that the figure of Lovelock often hovers in Flannery’s book and in the interview linked to above. Flannery is less pessimistic than Lovelock, but he acknowledges the wisdom of the older man’s sense of the inter-relatedness of things, and concedes that if things haven’t yet got as bad as Lovelock thinks, they aren’t too far off if we don’t soon change our ways.

In Hamilton

target An attendee at Nick Smith’s and Tim Groser’s public “consultation” at Hamilton last week was distinctly unimpressed.  He said so in a column given a prominent position in Tuesday’s Waikato Times. 

Rob Love expostulated that this was no consultation. Tedious introductions were followed by a long PowerPoint presentation by Environment Minister Dr Nick Smith. Finally, the Associate Minister Tim Groser “shared his observations on the blindingly obvious, while promoting the notion he is engaged heroically in the hardest negotiation ever undertaken.” There was little time left for discussion.

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Hitting now and hard

Bangladesh_49259The Oxfam briefing paper Suffering the Science which figured in a recent post discussing TV3 is well worth attention in its own right.  It is very much in tandem with the Copenhagen Synthesis Report which has been covered in a series of posts on Hot Topic.  The foreword is provided by Professor Diana Liverman who was a co-author of the Synthesis Report.  She comments that the Oxfam study adds powerful human stories to our understanding of climate risks and vulnerabilities.

What immediately stands out from the paper is that climate change is already having serious effects on the lives of poor people, especially in the tropics, and has been doing so for some time.  The paper observes with some asperity that the nations that made themselves wealthy by burning fossil fuels are largely those that will, initially, suffer least from the effects of climate shift. Rich countries in temperate zones are buffered by their wealth and less drastic effects from rising temperatures.  In other places climate change is hitting now and hitting hard.

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Climate classic: Kolbert’s Field Notes

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change

When the full seriousness of climate change began to dawn on me I read some books directly on the subject.  The first was Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change which had just been published. I’ve reread it for this review. It’s an admirable work.  I was impressed at how up to the mark it still is, three years on from publication. It remains a book which one could confidently recommend to anyone wanting to become quickly familiar with the issues. The writing is of the highest order of journalism, an intelligent mixture of relaxed narrative and clear, succinct summations.

Kolbert conveys the reality of global warming by recounting visits she was able to make to a variety of places and people. Not a large number, but each one significant, and Kolbert well able to show why. Her clear grasp of the basic science provides a thread through the experiences and meetings she describes. The Arctic figures strongly. She spent time with a geophysicist and permafrost expert in Alaska. The evidence of melting permafrost is unambiguous, and not affected by weather variations as air temperature is. In Greenland Kolbert stayed for a time at Swiss Camp, not far from the Jakobshavn glacier.  Scientists have worked there over many summers to try and get a handle on what is happening to the Greenland ice. The Jakobshavn in 1992 flowed at 3.5 miles per year; by 2003 it had increased to 7.8 miles per year.  The Arctic section of the book ended in Iceland at a scientific symposium in 2000, where it was already clear that whatever uncertainties there were about the effects of global warming there was no questioning at all of the relationship between carbon dioxide and rising temperatures.

From the Arctic Kolbert moves to butterflies, mosquitos, toads and other species showing evidence of species migration under the influence of global warming. She meets and speaks with individuals studying in these fields.  The extinction risk from global warming is significant even for species with the capacity for mobility, and high for those more tethered to their environment.  The prospect of everything changing its distribution and new biological communities needing to be formed carries unknown consequences for the services of our natural ecosystems.

Moving on to the human response to climate change Kolbert frames her treatment with reminders of how devastating drought has proved to human civilisation in the past.  Those droughts reflected the climate’s innate variability, but the climate shifts predicted for this century are attributable to forces whose causes we know and whose magnitude we will determine.  At this point she visits James Hansen and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, the NASA outpost he directs.  She provides a lucid account of how climate models work and the forcings they focus on.

The Netherlands provides a brief case study of how a country under threat from flooding is preparing to adapt to what lies ahead and the context for a discussion of what constitutes dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. Although when Kolbert was writing her book policy studies were often taking 500 parts per million of CO2 as the threshold she points to many climate scientists then considering 450 ppm as a more objective estimate of danger, with some arguing that the threshold should be 400 ppm or lower. The Vostok core from Antarctica shows that the present level of CO2 in the atmosphere is unprecedented in recent geological history. She remarks that the last time CO2 levels are believed to have been comparable with today’s level was three and a half million years ago, during the mid-Pliocene warm period.

The fearful prospect of business as usual led Robert Socolow to think about how CO2 emissions could be stabilized. Kolbert visited him on her return from the Netherlands to discuss the now famous stabilization wedges that he and Princeton colleague Stephen Pacala proposed as substitutes for CO2 emitting processes. She records his comments that the issue is similar to some in the past where something looked extremely difficult, and not worth it, and then people changed their minds.  Slavery was one such: “Something happened and all of a sudden it was wrong and we didn’t do it any more.”  His answer to questions about practicality: “Whether it’s practical or not depends on how much we give a damn.”

It’s hard to believe the Bush administration gave a damn. Kolbert’s interview with Paula Dobriansky, the Under Secretary charged with the unenviable task of explaining the Bush administration’s position on global warming, is a classic. Asked how the US justified its position on Kyoto to its allies: “Basically and fundamentally we have a common goal and objective, but we are pursuing different approaches.”  Three times in response to three different probing questions she repeated the mantra: “We act, we learn, we act again.”  John McCain characterised Bush’s position to Kolbert as MIA (missing in action).

In a 2006 afterword for a further edition of the book Kolbert notes that continuing new studies were pointing to the fact that the world is changing more quickly and dramatically than anticipated. She highlights melting Arctic sea ice, ocean acidification, increases in the rate of CO2 rise in the atmosphere, increased ice loss from Greenland, and evidence of Antarctic ice loss.  It’s all depressingly familiar still.  What she couldn’t point to in 2006 were changes in US political will.  They now appear to have happened, we must hope profoundly enough to soften the verdict of her final sentence: It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

 

Farming carbon: part of the solution?

This column was published in the Waikato Times on July 14

dairy-farmCould New Zealand agriculture be part of the solution to climate change?  We know all too well that it is part of the problem – and that’s not an accusation, by the way, just a recognition.  But problems are there to be tackled, and what is called carbon farming looks like one way in which agriculture can substantially contribute to climate change mitigation and at the same time improve the soils on which it depends.

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