Category: Book reviews

Fixing the Sky

Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia Studies in International and Global History)

The notion that if it comes to the worst in climate change we can fall back on geoengineering  receives little credence in James Rodger Fleming’s new book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate control. Fleming is a science historian and in the claims of some of today’s would-be climate engineers he sees a continuity with a long history of human attempts to control weather and climate. Most of the book traverses that history, which he urges we should understand and heed as we consider some of the proposed modern-day technological fixes to counter the effects of global warming.

He opens with the Greek myth of Phaeton who begged his father Helios to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun for one day but proved unable to hold the reins and keep to the middle course which Helios advised as safest and best. Only the intervention of Zeus with a fatal lightning bolt saved Earth from the consequent devouring flame. Fleming has something to say about the middle course when he gets to our own day, but in between he has many stories to tell in which hubris and ineptitude are combined, supported by “largely pathological” science, by opportunistic appeals to new technologies, and by “the false sense that macro-engineering will solve more problems than it creates”.

Rainmaking figures early and large in the book’s narrative. The first US government-employed meteorologist, James Espy (1795-1860), is well regarded in the history of science, but strayed from the scientific mainstream when promoting his  idea that significant rains of commercial importance could be generated by cutting and burning vast tracts of forest. Fortunately his grandiose plans were not supported. Other scientific rain kings of the 19th century used a variety of explosive means, sometimes with public funding, with very uncertain results. Fleming describes them as altruistic monomaniacs with a vision of a prosperous and healthy world if precipitation could be controlled. Not charlatans, but sincere albeit deluded. However charlatans did appear on the scene, mixing secret chemicals, preying on misguided hope and gullibility, and the book devotes an entertaining chapter to them.

One of the ironic characters of the story as it carries into the 20th century is Irving Langmuir (1881-1957), Nobel Laureate in chemistry and associate director of research at General Electric. Fleming comments that, brilliant though Langmuir was in chemistry, his extensive work in weather control exemplified his own warnings about pathological possibilities of science gone awry. Langmuir argued in a 1953 seminar that science conducted at the limits of observation or measurement may become pathological if the participants make excessive claims for their results. Yet he himself made highly dubious and unsupported claims for the efficacy of cloud seeding on a large scale. His biographer comments that he simply “did not appreciate the complexity of meteorology as a science”.

Weather control has had particular interest for the military; their entry into the issue brings “a darkening mood”. The book covers a variety of involvements, from the need to disperse fog from British airfields during the conflicts of WW2 (involving a massive and successful use of fire) to the “sordid episode” of attempted rainmaking during the Vietnam war to try to impede the passage of North Vietnam soldiers along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A UN Convention now prohibits military environmental modification techniques, though only if the effects are “widespread, long-lasting and severe”, a qualification insisted on by the US.

“Promethean possibilities” of climate tinkering using digital computing, satellite remote sensing, and nuclear power were part of the mid-20th century consideration of the subject. The scope of some of the dreams is startling – mega-construction projects to free the Arctic Ocean of ice or to lower the Mediterranean Sea, climate engineering to control weather vagaries.  Fleming describes many of them, and the seriousness with which some were taken, recording with some relief the words of Harry Wexler, chief of scientific services at the US Weather Bureau. Wexler was interested in purposeful intervention, but warned that it contained “the inherent risk of irremediable harm to our planet of side-effects counterbalancing the possible short-term benefits”.

Against the background of his “long and chequered history of weather and climate control populated by a colourful cast of dreamers and losers” Fleming moves to a consideration of the geoengineering proposals of today. Not surprisingly he views them with a jaundiced eye. He doesn’t deny the seriousness of human-caused climate change, but he sees little to recommend the various climate engineering schemes put forward. Indeed they are jointly characterised as “largely fantastic”.

None escape that characterisation. Aerosols, arrays of reflective material in space, iron fertilisation of the ocean, are readily swept aside. But it was a little surprising to see carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and biochar similarly treated. Admittedly there is much uncertainty surrounding CCS and it is more talked of than practised. It may indeed turn out to be impracticable, but it seems a little premature to condemn it as a possibility.  Biochar as a form of sequestration he claims would mark the end of composting and would generate a massive amount of the known carcinogen benzoapyrene.  I don’t know about the carcinogen, but I fail to see where the end of composting is involved. Klaus Lackner’s artificial trees are discussed in some detail and described as untenable.

Fleming advocates the “middle course” in dealing with climate change. That means reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases and adaptation to the measure of changing climate that we can no longer avoid.  The risks associated with moving into geoengineering measures are too great. To those who ask if that risk is worse than the risk of global warming he replies that it just might be, “especially if we neglect the historical precedents and cultural implications”. However he speaks approvingly of colleagues who support middle course solutions but also advocate responsible geoengineering research, so presumably his rejection is not as total as it sometimes seems. That was reassuring because as a reader I sometimes wondered whether he was fully cognisant of the magnitude of the threat from global warming.

However we surely need to be cautioned against those who rush to the grand fixes. Fleming is right to strongly reject economist William Nordhaus’s conclusion that “geoengineering produces major benefits whereas emissions stabilisation and climate stabilisation are projected to be worse than inaction”. He also does well to remind us of the inadequacy of “back-of-the-envelope” calculations to support geoengineering proposals. And to point to the fact that those who understand the climate system best are most humbled by its complexity and are among the least likely to claim that they have simple, safe, or cheap ways to fix it.

His book is often fascinating reading. Its comedic treatment of the history which comprises most of its content is nuanced and satisfyingly complex. What initially struck me as a lighthearted survey turned rapidly into a rewarding engagement with a gallery of characters, many of them intelligent and able, whose mistakes and failings we may learn from and hopefully not replicate.

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The Climate Connection

The Climate Connection: Climate Change and Modern Human Evolution

The authors of The Climate Connection: Climate Change and Modern Human Evolution are deeply aware of the threat to human survival accompanying our rising greenhouse gas emissions. Renée Hetherington and Robert G.B. Reid suggest that a better understanding of our past evolutionary relationship with climate may point to how we may yet make the future more hopeful than it presently seems. Not because the climates homo sapiens has had to live with in the past resemble what we are laying up for our future, but because the authors see elements in past human responses from which we might learn if we will.

The book covers a wide field, dealing with the emergence of modern humans, the dispersions and migrations of human populations, the climate changes of the last 350,000 years and the interaction between climate and humans during that time, concluding with reflections on our future in a very different climate environment. The survey is designed for those with courses of study in view or already working in the area and is hence often demanding for the general reader. It contains much detailed and carefully referenced information in its pages. However its underlying themes are regularly stated and provide ample bearings for readers for whom the territory is not familiar.

In discussing human behavioural evolution the authors espouse the working hypothesis that from the outset homo sapiens has had the potential to express the same thoughts, ideas, communication, spirituality, artistry and technical complexities as our own brains. But a combination of environmental conditions, both favourable and stressful, and increased social complexity was needed to bring out that potential. Robert Reid, a biologist, is a proponent of emergent evolution and a critic of the adequacy of natural selection theory. The book argues that environmental and climate connections have elucidated rapid changes in human behaviour in the past. Adaptability is required under conditions of stress and climatic instability which demand disregard of old ways and the adoption of new. Such adaptability has been demonstrated in human populations.

The book makes a long and careful journey looking for times when rapid behaviour change might have occurred. The “out of Africa” hypothesis underlies the authors’ survey, with much attention paid to early human mobility and migration. Geographical barriers to human movement, expansive coastal plains exposed when sea level fell during glacial periods, possible congregation of populations in productive refugia in glacial periods leading to increased genetic exchange, are among the factors the book considers as it surveys the evidence of the dispersal of behaviourally modern humans in the various regions of the world. The authors give especially close attention to the Americas where they have a greater research background.

A substantial section of the book examines climate during the last glacial cycle in considerable detail. It includes an excellent description of climate change forcing mechanisms. The authors have recently used the UVic Earth system climate model, which they describe as of intermediate complexity, in a project to understand the world’s changing climate over the last 135,000 years. Combining modelling with proxy indicators they try to reach a best estimate of the climate and its effects on vegetation over a number of different stages during that time. This is the changing world that our ancestors moved through and inhabited.

What did the changes mean for those ancestors? The book frankly acknowledges the huge gaps in any picture we can hazard constructing. The words ‘may’ and ‘likely’ occur frequently.  But it painstakingly matches any fossil and archeological evidence that can be matched and emerges with some general observations which certainly seem worthy of consideration. One in particular sounds a theme recurrent in the book. In the course of the glacial cycle they see probable migration out of deteriorating regions and into more habitable areas where disparate groups would be periodically placed in social contact with one another. It is this sort of social interaction that they consider likely to have stimulated the emergence of intelligence and the development of new ideas and technologies. Eventually the relatively more settled climate of the Holocene led to the development of agriculture which allowed humans to directly manipulate the unpredictability of nature, albeit sometimes precariously as the chapter surveying the history of agriculture makes clear.

Is all this any help as we face a climate changing because we are causing it to change, with prospect of an altered kind of world from that in which human civilisation developed?  We’re in a different situation from our roving ancestors. The authors point out that there are 6.75 billion of us now, expected to rise to over 9 billion by 2050. The global dominance we have achieved as a species has been achieved as we have discovered how to manipulate our environment. But with environmental manipulation has come the unintended consequence of human-caused climate change bringing the threat of severe economic and social instability. On a planet so heavily populated and whose resources are so stretched it is not possible to replicate a past when humans could migrate to new regions relatively unobstructed.

What then can we learn from the past experiences of our species?  It has to be said that the authors are hardly confident as they address the question towards the end of the book. However they do their best. In our past real changes in behaviour occurred when humans experienced significant environmental stress. They note that major environmental stress is clearly predicted in our future, so behavioural change may potentially be on the way. But they recognise that the problem is that we must change now before climate change puts us under those stresses. In effect, then, they suggest anticipating the stresses and opting for changes before they are forced upon us. Even as they do so they recognise that it’s by no means clear that we can manage this. For example they rather chillingly refer to Jared Diamond’s Collapse which speaks of ‘creeping normalcy’ as a major reason why people fail to recognise a problem until it is too late. Further, they note that Diamond states that even when the problem is recognised societies frequently fail to solve it because people are highly motivated to reap big, certain and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals.

Nevertheless in spite of all the negative possibilities the authors emphasise that the important message from past human interactions with climate is that we should work co-operatively in finding innovative solutions which will lead to the global sustainability which we have placed under threat. Revolutionary ideas have been stimulated in the past in response to rapidly changing environmental conditions and as a consequence of concentrating populations. Reluctance to change leaves us highly vulnerable to decline, and even extinction.

This advice is hardly new. It comes at us from many directions. But for the authors of this book it is reinforced by all they know of the long story of our species. The intrinsic interest in what they have to tell of that story is enhanced by their ever present sense of how it might assist us in understanding and confronting the challenges ahead for our species.

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The Weather of the Future

Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

Heidi Cullen takes readers forty years forward in her survey of what is likely to happen in several areas of the world if we continue to burn fossil fuels. Her book is The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet. It is a highly effective communication to the lay person of what climate science predicts for the specific areas she has chosen to explore. Cullen, a climatologist, works as a senior research scientist for Climate Central, an organisation set up in 2008 to act as a central authoritative source for climate change information.

Before moving to the selected areas for closer examination she offers some lucid general introductory chapters, including a very useful explanation of the use of modelling in climate prediction. In response to the question of when the weather will start to reflect predictions about the climate she answers that it already has in extreme weather events. If greenhouse gases continue to rise, the way weather affects life on Earth will be far worse than anything we’ve ever seen before. ”Can we rally around this forty-year forecast for the good of the world, or will we wait until the levees break before we decide to act?”

The first area Cullen surveys is the Sahel region of Africa.  She talks with climatologists who work on understanding the rainfall patterns and outlook for the region.  The picture is complex, but there is no doubt that the region is going to get warmer. All the models agree on that. They show some variation on the expected amount of rainfall, but it seems likely that the rainy season will start later and become shorter, with storms that will possibly become more intense. Pockets of resilience offer some hope from farmers who have turned to tree planting with considerable benefits to their crops and welcome extra income from the trees. But as Cullen takes her projections forward she remarks that there is only so much the trees can do against the increasing reality of climate change. Socially, climate change will become a threat multiplier as conflict spreads across the African continent in lockstep with temperature.

The next selected area is the Great Barrier Reef. Cullen talks with Joanie Kleypas, a marine ecologist and geologist who uses climate models to study the health of coral reefs. “I work on coral reefs, for God’s sake. The entire coral science community is depressed.” The chapter provides very clear accounts of the bleaching effect of warming oceans (“Bleached corals aren’t dead; they’re just starving.”) and the deleterious effect on coral growth from ocean acidification. The speed of both warming and acidification is likely to quickly outpace the conditions under which coral reefs have adapted and flourished through past changes. They are unlikely to be able to adapt fast enough. It’s not a good outlook. Cullen allows herself a detour to point to other and more dramatic effects of climate change that Australia is set to encounter – ferocious wildfires, pervasive drought, and unbreathable air. The lucky country looks anything but in coming decades.

The US is a leading per capita contributor to global emissions. It has not yet accepted the level of responsibility it carries. Other places, far less responsible and much poorer, are bearing the early consequences of global warming. But that doesn’t mean the US will remain exempt from any serious consequences, and it was good to see Cullen turning to her own country for two of her chapters, and driving home that message.  One of the places she selects is Central Valley, California.  The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a focus of her attention here. It’s the hub of California’s water supply system. The Hollywood-style dream is that the Delta will be able to supply enough clean fresh water to help cities and crops increase “forever”, all without harm to the natural environment, she notes dryly. She speaks with a multidisciplinary team studying the Delta, which in reality has far more in common with New Orleans than with Hollywood. The details of the problems and threats are canvassed and the extreme vulnerability of California to coming water shortage exposed. Her other US focus is New York city. Here it will be energy blackouts which threaten as the average temperature increases over coming decades. The power grid is unsuited to climate extremes. The other major area not ready for what lies ahead is flood protection.  However planning is going on in New York to develop resilience to what the changed climate will deliver, and also to mitigate the city’s emissions.  Cullen imagines a time four years from now in which, following damage from a storm, a co-ordinated plan is finally adopted by an alarmed population and New York becomes a city obsessed with adapting to climate change. It clearly needs to.

Her other chapters look at more obviously and immediately vulnerable places. In the Arctic she examines the current experience of the Inuit in an area of Canada and in Greenland. Change is well under way as sea ice diminishes and permafrost melts. It brings with it not only the physical challenges to the Inuit ways but also severe cultural threats. In Greenland as the ice melts there’s the promise of wealth from resource extraction, and the ambiguities that come with it. Bangladesh is skilled in adaptation to change and experienced in flood management, but by 2050 with almost 25 per cent of the country under water as a result of rising seas and increasing tropical cyclones, accompanied by the slow and deadly seepage of saline water into wells and fields, Bangladesh will be in serious trouble. Millions of villagers will have to move to the city, and many are likely to cross illegally into India hoping to find work.

The value of Cullen’s book is that by focusing on specific places, and by talking with scientists who are devoting full attention to the problems climate change poses for those places, she brings the reader close up to inescapable realities. The details are spelt out. Moreover she does this by a lively narrative of her discussions with the scientists closely involved. Her book is not a dry account of scientific papers but a picture of the people working to understand, predict and prepare for what is in waiting for the populations in the areas she discusses. It’s a reminder too of the number and variety of people who now work on climate change-related issues.

The book recognises the adaptation capabilities being shown by some of the populations already affected by climate changes. It is with some reluctance that it acknowledges the possibility of defeat if high emission levels continue. They don’t need to continue, of course, but that is in the hands of policy makers. Cullen in conclusion examines two words in use in the science. One is unequivocal, used to describe the warming of the climate system. The other is irreversible, used to describe uncertain but all too possible eventualities. She uses the cutting down of the last tree on Easter Island, as imagined so vividly by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, as an analogy for irreversibility. Unfortunately as yet the two words are not powerful enough in policy circles to shift the forecast for the future.

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The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice

The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice

Addressing climate change will require citizens of wealthy consumer societies to sacrifice. But that’s never going to happen. We’ve all heard statements like that, indeed we’ve probably muttered them to ourselves. Michael Maniates and John Meyer place the words at the beginning of their book The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice. They and their ten fellow-contributors examine exhaustively what they describe as “the political stickiness of sacrifice-talk” to see if there are more hopeful options than the stark contradiction of that opening statement.

In fact, as several of the writers point out, there is a normalcy to sacrifice which is part of many people’s lives. It may be mingled with self-interest, but the sacrifices we make for children, for causes we care about, perhaps for our careers, are essential to making our lives meaningful and pleasurable, and for the most part are recognised and welcomed as such. That kind of sacrifice becomes ingrained in who we are and doesn’t feel like sacrifice. It is not heroic, but sacrifice needn’t be restricted to the exceptional undertaking that cannot be expected of ordinary people. The book doesn’t argue for sacrifice on a superhuman scale for the sake of the environment. Its discussions of the word are nuanced and show a preference for the normalisation of environmental sacrifice whereby it becomes part of the price we willingly pay for the welfare of future generations and the Earth they will inhabit.

Paul Wapner examines the upbeat notion that tackling climate change is a call to embrace new green opportunities rather than be concerned about sacrifice.  “Promethean” environmentalism he calls it. But he prefers to keep the sacrifice word in environmental discourse and points to writers like McKibben who see environmental sacrifice not as a matter of reduction but rather enlargement.  Environmentalism takes Others into consideration by realising that we are not the centre of the universe, and in doing so it is not a politics of less but one of inestimable more. Sacrifice is not a deprivation, but a provision – it involves feeding our moral selves. Karen Liftin in her chapter on the sacred and profane, as she argues for an affirmative politics of sacrifice in an ecologically full world quotes the Indian nationalist and mystic Sri Aurobindo:

“The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world…The true essence of sacrifice is not self-immolation, it is self-giving; its object is not self-effacement, not self-fulfilment; its method not self-mortification, but a greater life.”

There are strong currents in modern affluent society which make this kind of perception difficult. Thomas Princen looks closely at the beguiling concept of consumer sovereignty. There’s a grand entitlement to consumption. The good life centres on goods, not on relations, not on service, not on citizenship.  It leads to a society supremely organised to absolve individuals of responsibility, whether as consumers, producers, investors, or rule makers.  Sacrifice is depreciated and rejected. But in fact much is sacrificed to maintain such a society, in costs and trade-offs, social and environmental problems which are rendered covert and hidden.

“… the hedonistic, growth-manic, cost-displacing consumer economy must give way to a purposeful economy, an economy premised on principles of positive sacrifice, of giving (along with receiving), of sufficiency and good work and participatory citizenship. The sovereign consumer must be dethroned; sacrifice must be elevated, restored to its proper, ‘make sacred’ pedestal.”

Sometimes the built environment makes sacrifice for the environment difficult. Peter Cannavό looks at the development of suburbia in America and the way in which its original pastoral civic republicanism has been lost, especially in the closed, often gated, communities of the post World War II outer suburban expansion. The very form of sprawling suburbia mandates unrestrained consumption, privatism, and exclusivity. The automobile becomes what Lewis Mumford called “a compulsory and inescapable condition of suburban existence”. Zoning laws decree low-density development. Shopping is removed from neighbourhood and town. People are increasingly isolated in their cars and homes. Cannavό looks at ways in which suburbia could be reconstructed to become greener, more moderate and civic and sustainable, and expresses the hope that suburbanites will be willing to sacrifice what they have now in favour of what he sees as a return to suburbia’s republican roots.

Justin Williams provides an interesting essay on the difficulties placed in the way of bicycling as a contribution to environmental sustainability. He observes that there is little meaningful freedom, in America at least, to make choices about transport modes and hence it is difficult for sacrifice to enter the rhetorical field. Structural decisions, particularly those associated with suburban development, have placed cars at the centre and turned streets from social gathering places into means of transport between two distant places, home and work. The obstacles these developments place in the way of cyclists are formidable, paramount among them the distances that need to be travelled, the dearth of facilities such as adequate routes and parking, and the threats posed to personal safety by cycling among cars. Nevertheless a combination of carrots and sticks in cities such as Portland and Chicago in the US and in a  country such as the Netherlands has made cycling a more genuine option. He argues that the promotion of cycling at automobility’s expense is democratic because automobility is not an expression of freedom but merely the structurally “obvious” choice, given the constraints placed on alternatives, and because the freedom to cycle is limited by current automobile infrastructure.  I warmed to his advocacy. I have taken to cycling myself in my later years and often observe myself reduced to pathetic gratitude for very minor provisions for cyclists in my own city.

Can academics refining the concept of environmental sacrifice dent the prevailing perception, often vehemently expressed in the hurly burly of every day politics, that it’s almost an affront to expect wealthy consumer societies to make sacrifices? Sometimes it can seem an insuperable task. But I liked the idea of doggedness to which the editors give voice in their conclusion. They quote Frances Moore Lappé: “keep asking ‘why?’”. They urge students, activists, scholars and citizens to ask, and keep asking, why sacrifice should be pushed to the margins, why narrow assumptions about the capacity and willingness of humans to sacrifice should prevail, why leaders remain reluctant to call on our ability to sacrifice on behalf of public aims. That’s the first challenge. Four others follow: developing awareness of the many rich ways in which sacrifice infuses daily life; shaping environmental politics to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice or at least to make it part of the discussion; identifying and studying illustrative examples where sacrifice is made for distant benefits; engaging in a nuanced way with the rhetorical power of sacrifice, a word perilous in public debate but not therefore to be shunned.

The book is a thoughtful and lively contribution to an issue which gathers importance and urgency as the years of climate inaction continue to accumulate. There is still hope we will choose the democratic sacrifice which the book advances. If we spurn it we are likely to have sacrifice forced on us by the passage of events.

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Challenged by Carbon

Challenged by Carbon: The Oil Industry and Climate ChangeOil industry geologists have hardly been noted for their readiness to accept the findings of climate science. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, a large international organisation of 31,000 members, is non-committal in its 2007 statement, though that was admittedly an advance on their previous rejection of anthropogenic warming.  Bryan Lovell has worked as a BP geologist as well as an academic, but the title of his book is enough to indicate that non-committal is not for him: Challenged by Carbon: The Oil Industry and Climate Change.

 

In his acceptance of the case for anthropogenic global warming Lovell lays great stress on the evidence from the past, long before there were any of the human species to influence what happened. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a warming event 55 million years ago, is his focus. It is preserved in the geological record and the changes it caused to life on the planet mark the boundary between the two epochs. First, a large quantity of carbon was released into the ocean-atmosphere over the geologically short period of some 10,000 years. Second, the temperature at the bottom of the ocean increased rapidly by more than 4 degrees over the same short period. Third, the oceans became notably more acidic. All this was accompanied by a general and significant global warming. It took some 200,000 years for the planet to return to something resembling the conditions prevailing before the massive and sudden release of carbon. Lovell remarks an ominously striking correspondence between the rate at which large volumes of carbon were introduced 55 million years ago and the rate at which large volumes are now being put into the atmosphere by us.

He considers the evidence of this event is more likely to carry weight with oil industry geologists than the computer-based models of complicated natural systems employed by climatologists. Geologists are “happiest when basing their predictions on the solid ground of rocks”. This may be a useful insight into the slowness of some geologists to take climate change seriously, but it left me wondering at the somewhat blinkered intellectual world which it suggests. I also wondered whether Lovell sufficiently appreciated the attention climatologists pay to the past in their predictions of what lies ahead. He acknowledges that the picture is somewhat mixed, but broadly sees climatologists focusing on predictions of the future, relying on a combination of past trends and computer modelling to make their forecasts, by contrast with geologists who look back in time. Is this contrast real? Leading climatologist James Hansen frequently stresses that his order of importance is first paleoclimate studies, then ongoing climate observations, with climate models in third place. Also detailed discussions of the PETM and other significant global change events in the past are common in books concerned with climate change.  However, if only the story told by rocks will suffice for oil geologists so be it. It has certainly brought Lovell on board.

“It is now plausible for the geological community at large, not least those in the oil industry, to join with the climatologists and conclude that if we continue to release carbon dioxide  into the atmosphere at the present rate we shall, this century, experience among other effects significant acidification of the world’s oceans and an overall global rise in sea level. Even at the lowest likely level these changes will have a significant adverse effect on our species and at their upper  likely levels would be disastrous for many of us. How will the oil industry react?”

Lovell comments that protestations of virtue concerning climate change by oil companies have become a commonplace this century. Some may maintain a degree of cynicism as they read his descriptions of how this plays out within the industry itself, but he makes a reasonable case that there has been some change in industry perception.  He acknowledges the contradiction in accepting the reality of anthropogenic climate change, yet predicting that fossil fuels will form an essential part of energy provision through to the middle of this century and beyond. He calls it not contradiction but paradox, as indeed it could prove if the serious industry investment in carbon capture and storage he urges were carried through to success.

It is this prospect which is the main burden of the book. Lovell sees little possibility of the world forsaking fossil fuels. “Lofty and high-level” arguments are unlikely to prevail in either the comfortable developed countries or the aspiring developing nations. They would need to be convinced that the rapid elimination of the oil and coal industries is really necessary. His book is not intended to offer such conviction.

What he does offer and advise is the engagement of the oil industry in carbon capture and storage. The scientific expertise it has gathered is highly relevant to the task:

“Petroleum engineers and petroleum geologists seek to understand the rocks beneath our feet, how fluids move through those rocks and how those elements may interact with the minerals lining the pore spaces and pore throats through which they travel. This understanding is just what is required to assess the suitability of any given location for the safe storage of carbon dioxide and to then store that gas securely within the rocks below.”

The details are followed through in some detail in a chapter headed Safe Storage: From Villain to Hero. Existing oil reservoirs offer useable opportunities, but not sufficient to satisfy the very large requirements.  For that the use of saline aquifers will be needed. Lovell reports studies on the feasibility of such storage, some of them dealing with the reaction of the reservoir rock to fluids made more acid by the addition of injected carbon dioxide. Careful assessment of prospective sites is required. He is cautious in his appraisal, but optimistic that carbon dioxide can be safely trapped in reservoirs over geological timescales. Along the way he acknowledges the work of Kelemen and Matter (reported here in Hot Topic) on the possibility of trapping carbon dioxide in a type of igneous rock – peridotite – with which it would react rapidly. The concern for him is the absence of natural seals in such a process, and he considers pilot ventures are likely to remain focused on sealed reservoirs.

Oil companies work for profit. That is why the issue of a carbon price is critical if the expertise of those companies is going to be harnessed to capture and store carbon.  The price, says Lovell, has to reflect a real understanding of the danger of not controlling the release of carbon dioxide. Increased government regulation is essential to set the scene.

The book is lively and engaging and well worth attention. Lovell straddles two worlds which often enough appear to have little intercourse. Carbon capture and storage gets a mixed press in discussions of climate change mitigation. But if it really is feasible, and if setting a price on carbon will make it doable by those with the necessary expertise and finance, it has the potential to be a significant contributor to emissions reduction. Even if we find ways to replace fossil fuel much more quickly than Lovell envisages we will still need to sequester some of the excess carbon with which the atmosphere is already overloaded.

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