Category: Book reviews

Gaia in turmoil

Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis

The title attracted my attention: Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis. Plus the fact that it was a collection of writings, not another hammer blow from the father of Gaian science James Lovelock. The comforting name of Bill McKibben was there as writer of the foreword. I don’t mean to disparage Lovelock, whose early book on the Gaia understanding of Earth I read with appreciation a good many years ago. But his more recent climate-focused books, The Revenge of Gaia and The Vanishing Face of Gaia , the latter reviewed here, have been relentless in conclusions which I find hard to bear.

Not that this book, edited by Eileen Crist and Bruce Rinker, is soothing, but its warnings are not quite so inexorable.  Also it has a wider focus that takes in more than the global warming issue.  Wide enough to make me wonder whether it was really suited for review on a climate change website, but I have persevered because it contains some climate change messages which I’ll concentrate on.

The Gaian perspective, which if you don’t respond to literary metaphor can be described as viewing Earth as a single organism, has been helpful in underscoring how the actions of humans in releasing the stored carbon of fossil fuels have caused a disturbance of the Earth system far greater than can easily be comprehended.  In the chapter on global warming Donald Aitken stresses that slight mismatches in the balance of energy flows can cause great destabilisation effects. Unbalanced flows occur naturally from time to time and are averaged out. But not in the case of the human burning of fossil fuels, which has gone out of bounds and is now leading to increasing destabilisation of the planet’s energy, temperature and climate systems. Evidence is seen in such phenomena as increased hurricane intensity, melting Arctic summer ice, reduced Greenland and West Antarctic ice,  a reduction in primary ocean productivity and ocean acidifcation – the usual suspects.  Aitken is an interrnational expert on renewable energy and considers that a combination of renewable energy resources and energy efficiency, the latter particularly in buildings, may well be enough to avoid the dangerous climate thresholds provided leaps in policies are taken by all nations. He contrasts the inertia of Earth’s physical processes with the capacity of humans to elect to change their social structures and adopt new global responsibilities on much shorter time scales. That’s in our favour, assuming we rise to the responsibility.

Biodiversity depletion figures strongly throughout the book, particularly in a chapter by Stephan Harding.  We are in the throes of a mass extinction entirely due to the economic activities of modern industrial societies.  Species are disappearing at a rate up to 10,000 times the natural rate. This is not all down to global warming, by any means, but it is part of the same heedlessness which treats the natural world as ours to do with as we will. Climate change is exacerbating the biodepletion, with the capacity to transform the Earth into a biological wasteland. It works both ways, for biodiversity also affects the climate.  Harding identifies some of the intricate ways in which this happens. Diverse ecological communities on land can increase the absorption of carbon dioxide. It is almost certain that biodiversity in the ocean also enhances this effect, through the presence of larger phytoplankton more often found in diverse communities.  Transpiration and evaporation are greater when there is diversity of land plants and can enhance cloud-making and energy distribution.  The roughness of mixed vegetation increases air turbulence which may well influence weather patterns. Harding rounds off his biodiversity chapter with the challenging observation that ultimately we may not be able to save what we do not love.

Lovelock himself makes a brief appearance in the book, in which he asks why the science of Gaia is still regarded by many as New Age mysticism and not part of science. He puts it down mainly to the stunning success of the reductionist approach to science, examplified in such triumphs as those in molecular biology and the deconvolution of the code of life.  The slow change to Earth system thinking would not matter so much if we humans had secure tenure on the Earth, but the climate changes we have set in motion appear to be changing the planet radically to one of its hot states. He ponders how Darwinian evolution might have been shaped had Darwin been aware that much of the environment, especially the atmosphere, was the product of living organisms. With such awareness he thinks Darwin would have realised that organisms and their environment form a coupled system and that what evolved was this system. Had Gaia been part of Darwin’s concept of evolution we might have realised sooner the consequences of deforestation and of adding greenhouse gases to the air.

Lovelock cops some criticism from Karen Liftinin her rough sketch of the principles of Gaian government. She acknowledges his great service in sounding the alarm on global warming but finds his policy prescriptions insensitive to social, ethical, psychological, and smaller scale ecological questions. One-sided engineering panaceas and technocratic elitism won’t do.

Mitchell Thomashow proposes curriculum development in schools which will train a generation of students who see the biosphere in every habitat and organism, who are equipped to interpret environmental change, who are keen to observe the natural world, and who know that their very survival may depend on it. I thought while reading his chapter of the Enviroschool programme open to New Zealand schools, for which the Minister of Education has unbelievably stoppped funding, but which appears likely to be rescued by funds from other government sources. I have seen the programme in action at a grandchild’s primary school and appreciated its potential for informing the full range of a child’s education. I recall the very sensible call in David Orr’s book Down to the Wire for a shift in education methods so that learning is relative to the biosphere and ecological awareness.

The various contributions to the book cover a wide range Gaian science, ethics and philosophy.  One Grand Organic Whole is the title of the editors’ opening chapter. They acknowledge that the early strong Gaia hypothesis that the biota controls the global environment in an almost purposeful fashion will not stand. The weak hypothesis that life physically and chemically influences the environment is too self-evident. They see the studies in this book as exploring the mid terrain between these two positions. When it comes to action enlightened realism acknowledges the need for preservation and restoration of Gaia’s natural systems. This requires sustainable retreat -– scaling down our consumption, shrinking our ecological footprint, and generously sharing the biosphere with all living beings.

Storms of My Grandchildren

Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity

Photos of James Hansen’s grandchildren have appeared not infrequently in  his presentations in recent years.  He obviously delights in them.  But he also fears for them.  The nature of that fear is spelt out in his newly published book Storms of my Grandchildren with its foreboding subtitle The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.

Last chance?  As critical as that?  In his lucid concluding summary statement Hansen points to climate system inertia as the reason. Currently inertia is protecting us from the full effects of the changes and can seem like a friend. But, as amplifying feedbacks begin to drive the climate towards tipping points, that same inertia will make it harder to reverse direction. The ocean, ice sheets and frozen methane on continental shelves all resist rapid change, but only for so long.  And they are being subjected to human-made forcings far more rapid than any of the natural forcings of the past.

Science is at the core of the book, but Hansen has woven it into a narrative of his encounters with policy makers over the past eight years. In 2001 he was invited to explain current scientific thinking to the cabinet-level Climate Task Force. He focused on changes in climate forcings, in watts per square metre, between 1750 and 2000, using a graph which estimated the effects of a variety changes dominated by human activity. The information seems clear enough as Hansen shares it with us, but it obviously became muddied in the Task Force proceedings, especially when.contrarian Richard Lindzen was  invited to the second meeting and focused on uncertainties as well as questioning the motives of “alarmist” scientists. Hansen’s belief that the new administration was serious about wanting to understand climate change looks a little naïve in retrospect. Incidentally Hansen himself is always aware of uncertainties in his science and careful to accord them proper status.

A further invitation to a different White House group in 2003 saw him centre his presentation this time on paleoclimate and the evidence from the past  that large climate changes can occur in response to even small forcings. This topic is explored at some length, with occasional exhortations to readers to hang on if it seems to be getting too complicated.  Feedback figures prominently here, as does climate sensitivity to doubled carbon dioxide.  The non-carbon dioxide forcings such as methane and black soot attracted some interest at the meeting, but the administration by now seemed to share Richard Lindzen’s perspective and to distrust the scientific community.  He records no further invitations to White House meetings.

2003 saw the publication of a paper by Hansen which questioned the IPCC and conventional approach to sea level rise.  He explains in the book the evidence from paleoclimate studies of rapid sea level rise and discusses the part played by the huge reservoir of energy provided by the ocean and by ice sheet dynamics.  If ice sheets begin to disintegrate we can expect no new stable sea level on any foreseeable timescale. Ocean and ice sheets each have response times of at least centuries.

In 2005 Hansen endured the events described by Mark Bowen’s book Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming, reviewed here. Some of this ground is traversed again here, and then Hansen offers readers the bad news that the dangerous threshold of greenhouse gases is actually lower than the 450 ppm he had accepted for some years, and goes on to explain how this change of mind occurred.

The name of Bill McKibben enters the scene at this point, for it was in response to his request for an appropriate parts per million figure for his website that Hansen settled with colleagues to re-examine the question.  The result was the famous 2008 paper Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? and McKibben’s 350.org movement.  The two climate impacts that Hansen believes should be at the top of the list that defines what is “dangerous” are sea level rise and species extinction.  He explains how reduction of CO2 levels to 350 ppm would restore the planet’s energy balance.

Hansen is widely honoured and respected in the scientific community. He has also taken some pains to make his scientific work accessible to the general reader, as his website reveals. He is happy to accept writer Robert Pool’s description of him as a witness, meaning  “someone who believes he has information so important that he cannot keep silent.”

Criticised for his incursions into the field of policy in more recent years, Hansen is unapologetic about it when he comes to draw conclusions from the research on the appropriate target level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. “Coal emissions must be phased out as rapidly as possible or global climate disasters will be a dead certainty.” Should scientists deliver that conclusion and then leave it to the politicians to deal with it?  Not in his experience. They will fudge the issue if they can. In particular he is scathing in his rejection of cap-and-trade schemes, which he considers will continue to allow fossil fuels to be burned.  He favours instead a rising price on carbon applied at the source, with the fee returned to the population in equal shares. This insistence on the carbon tax method rather than emissions trading may well lack finesse, as his critics allege, but the suspicion of vested interests and of the influence of lobbyists which underlies it is surely justified.

He admits that the phasing out of coal emissions by 2030 is a huge challenge.  Energy efficiency measures and renewable energy development will probably not in his view be sufficient to replace coal by then, and he eloquently pleads the case for 3rd and 4th generation nuclear plants.

A scary chapter looks at what he calls the Venus syndrome.  Back in 1981 when he wrote his first comprehensive paper on the impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide he presumed that, as the reality of climate change became apparent, government policies would begin to be adapted in a rational way.  He didn’t count on two challenges to that presumption. The first is the remarkable success of special interests in preventing the public at large from understanding the situation. The second is politicians’ almost universal preference for greenwash and fake environmentalism. All right, he says, what will happen if we go on burning and push the planet beyond its tipping point?     After a careful discussion of consequences he concludes that if we burn all the reserves of oil, gas, and coal there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale it’s a dead certainty.  Between times lie the storms which will be upon us during the lives of his grandchildren.

Small wonder the scientist has become a climate activist and places such hope as he can muster in the mobilisation of young people to demand appropriate actions from their governments. Activists are not gloom and doom merchants, and it’s clear that he hopes the general public will yet become aware of the real threat discerned by the science and demand the action so far avoided by politicians. All honour to him for the witness he bears.

Climate Change 101: an educational resource

Resolve falters before the intimidating size of the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). There are, of course, summaries, but what Andy Reisinger of Victoria University has attempted in his new book  Climate Change 101: An Educational Resource is more than a summary.  It is better described as an accessible overview of the ground AR4 more extensively covers. He aims to provide for senior high school students, university undergraduates or interested lay persons a systematic account of the scientific knowledge relevant to climate change and the response we need to make to its impacts. He succeeds well. All the main elements of a complex field are included and the book is packed with information, but a clear line of exposition is maintained throughout which assists a patient reader to understand how all this material contributes to the full picture. Reisinger was no doubt well prepared for his task by working as an editor of the AR4 Synthesis Report.

An outline of what the book contains gives little idea of the complexities of the author’s presentation, but I’ll indicate its broad framework. The first half deals with the basic science and Reisinger builds his material in four steps which make the logic of the science very clear.  The first step is to look at observable changes in climate and their effects, without any assumptions as to what might be causing them.  The climate is warming, unequivocally. Observable impacts of the warming are apparent in changes in such areas as coral reefs, agriculture and forestry, physical systems like glacier lakes and river flows, and various ecosystems.

The second step is to enquire what is driving these observed climate changes.  Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations are an obvious candidate, but Reisinger stresses the need to demonstrate that only the increased greenhouse gas concentrations can account for the warming. Models have been important here. No other cause has left its fingerprint.

Step three considers projections for future changes. They include continuing increases in temperature, continuing sea level rise with an uncertain upper level because of the poorly understood dynamics of ice sheet glacier flow, changes in ice melt and snow cover, changes in regional precipitation, non-linear changes in climatic extremes. The complications of feedbacks are explored in this section.

Step four traverses many of the likely impacts which will result from the changing climate, in a range including effects on water supply, eco-system consequences, food supply, coastal zone threats, health effects, and the frequency of extreme events. The impacts are likely to be very unevenly distributed across different regions.

It’s a natural progression to move to consider how we can deal with the projected impacts of climate change, and the second half of the book centres on the two complementary strategies of adaptation and mitigation. The first increases our resilience to cope with the expected impacts. The second limits the scale of future impacts by limiting and reducing further emissions of greenhouse gases. The surveys of the two approaches are detailed and comprehensive. The way the two are combined to minimise risks and damages is important. The questions he discusses at this point include: How do we best balance our global efforts between adaptation and mitigation? How much mitigation is necessary to keep global impacts and adaptation needs at a manageable level? At what level should we aim to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations, and how quickly do we need to reduce emissions to get there? How do we know it’s worth the cost?

An important chapter explores the relationship between climate change and development, explaining how understanding the interactions between the two can help us address both challenges together rather than playing them off against each other.

Finally he considers how the global response to climate change has developed through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, and other processes.  Thorny questions beset the search for agreement on the path ahead, and he writes with full appreciation of the difficulties for the various interests involved. Finding a fair and equitable balance of efforts between different country groups is a major stumbling block, even when most agree that greenhouse gases should be stabilised at no more than 450 ppm CO2-eq. Reisinger’s concluding reflection acknowledges the complications and frustrations of the process but affirms our personal responsibility to remain engaged with an issue for which we will be accountable decades from now.

Those are the bare bones of the book, but its value lies in the thoroughness of its coverage and the patience of its explanations. It is a painstaking work. There are no hasty conclusions, few stones left unturned, no legitimate interests ignored.  It should serve its declared educational purpose well.

Ice Age

The Complete Ice Age: How Climate Change Shaped the World

It might be about the last ice age, but global warming concerns are never far away in Brian Fagan’s latest book The Complete Ice Age: How Climate Change Shaped the World. Fagan collaborates with three other writers to explain how our understanding of the ice age has developed since the great 19th century achievement of its discovery. A book for the general reader, its content is well explained in medium-length chapters with many photographs and helpful illustrations.

Fagan kicks off with an account of how geologists first began to interpret the signs of glaciation and to posit the advance of great continental ice sheets in northern land masses. He also describes the early searches for clues as to when and why the ice age had begun and how many glacial events it may have included, culminating in the essential validity of theories that variations in the motion of the earth around the sun triggered the multiple glaciations.

Paleoclimatologist Mark Maslin takes up the story, first looking at the possible confluence of events, particularly tectonic, which pushed the warm planet of 50 million years ago into increasing coldness. A near ice age 5 million years ago seems to have been aborted by the influence of ocean currents, but full onset was realised some 2.5 million years ago. A climatic rollercoaster followed, with many glacial-interglacial cycles, alternating coldness and warmth. The waxing and waning of the huge continental ice sheets was initiated by changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun which were then amplified and transformed by various feedback mechanisms. Sometimes things happened quickly. The so-called Heinrich events, massive collapses of the North American Laurentide ice sheet, which added enormous quantities of cold fresh water to the North Atlantic and altered ocean currents provide a stark warning of the possible extreme and rapid effects of climate change in the future.

John Hoffecker, an expert on human adaptations to cold climates, offers a fascinating chapter on the human response to the ice age. Novel forms of humankind evolved repeatedly in Africa and migrated into Eurasia during the Ice Age, confronting either intense cold or intervals of warmth. Homo sapiens, finally, with the emergence of mind brought a new capacity for adaptation to environmental challenges. They spread into an astonishing range of habitats and climate zones without differentiating into new species, and displaced their cold-adapted Neanderthal cousins. One hopes that the creative powers of mind will be adequate to the rather different range of challenges ahead.

Paleontologist Hannah O’Regan completes the picture with a survey of the animal life of the ice age. Megafauna survived all glacials but the last, and while acknowledging the controversy surrounding the extinctions O’Regan notes that what differentiates the last glaciation from the others is the arrival of modern humans on all continents.

Fagan returns with a chapter on the way human communities have adapted and flourished in the ten or so millenia since the last glacial period. Sea level rises in the order of 90-120 metres were among the staggering environmental changes initially faced. The relatively stable climatic conditions of the Holocene have seen the development of agriculture and animal domestication and the appearance of civilisation, but even minor temperature and rainfall shifts within this context have had dramatic effects on human societies, especially through the incidence of famine. “We would be rash to assume that our own cities are impregnable to climatic forces that are beyond our control.”  (Readers of Brian Fagan’s absorbing earlier book on the medieval warm period The Great Warming will recall his reconstruction of the devastating effects of drought on many civilisations of the time and his expressed concern that future global warming, unprecedented for human society, will include drought that will severely affect crowded populations in vulnerable parts of today’s world.)

As Mark Maslin reminds us in a final chapter on the future, we are part of the ice age and depend on its legacy. The huge ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are witness to that. What happens if you put lots of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of a planet with lots of ice sheets? That is the experiment which is now under way. What the study of the Ice Age tells us is that when climate changes it can do so suddenly and without warning. The book adds its voice to the many warning us that the experiment is dangerous and should be stopped.

The study of past climates is important for our understanding of the present and the future we are storing up, as a number of books reviewed on Hot Topic make clear, including Broecker’s Fixing Climate, Ward’s Under a Green Sky, Turney’s Ice, Mud and Blood and Archer’s The Long Thaw. But in a book like this one by Fagan and his associates there’s also an intrinsic interest in the picture of the past that is being constructed as the jigsaw is assembled. I read it partly for the sheer pleasure of sensing the past, untroubled, albeit only briefly, by anxieties about the future.

Science as a contact sport

Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate

Climatologist Stephen Schneider has often found himself in the thick of contests, as indicated by the title of his new book Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate. He has been engaged in climate science since its early stages in the 1970s and has much to tell about the dawning realisation that global warming was to be the outcome of our emission of greenhouse gases. In fact his first venture in the field as a grad student overestimated the effect of aerosols and predicted global cooling over the 21st century. Deniers still hold this up as indicating that his science is untrustworthy.  He on the contrary sees it as evidence that science progresses by continuously correcting its conclusions based on new research.

The function of modelling and the ways models work is a regular topic in the early stages of his story.  The question of predicting the future proved to be a thorny one, particularly when the science was newly developing. “If you don’t model, you don’t know anything about the future.”  The important thing was to build models on as much relevant data as possible. He explains some of the difficulties encountered and overcome along the way.

Schneider also early began to see that it was important to try to estimate how specific variables – such as drought and flood frequencies and temperature extremes – would change, because they would have major impacts on agriculture, ecology, water supplies, coastlines, and so forth. He insisted that climate scientists had to consider the social implications of what they were researching. In other words science for policy, viewed as suspect by many scientists in the 1970s.

The linking of atmospheric science in partnerships particularly with experts in economics, ecology, agriculture, oceanography and hydrology is a strong thread in Schneider’s story.  His interdisciplinary bent was not always welcomed by his peers, but it is very much of a piece with his recognition of the implications of climate change for ecologies and human society. Involvement with the Inuit and other indigenous peoples is a continuing part of his life, and his concern at how climate change threatens these groups in their home environments is firm. “No community should be forced from their home or their culture – whether as tropical reef island or a once frozen tundra.”

He was early pulled into the public arena and took part in a 1981 Gore congressional hearing. He describes in detail the ideological polemics of the Reagan administration representatives at that hearing.  His own contribution was guarded and aimed to be constructive. Generally speaking many of his statements in public fora seem cautious and careful not to overstate. It struck me as ironic that  he should be held up by the denialist community as an example of one given to exaggeration of environmental threats. Twenty years ago in an interview with a journalist he tried to explain the need to be both effective and honest with the public, which meant conveying both urgency and uncertainty. Selected sentences have since been used as “proof” that he advocates overstatement.

Schneider has played an important role in the preparation of IPCC reports. The size and scope of the enterprise is explained, and the debate that is integral to it. His description is instructive. If ever there was a thorough process this is surely it.  And the need to satisfy not just fellow scientists but governments is crucial. He includes a fascinating –- or perhaps horrifying –- account of the four-day meeting at which the text of the Fourth Assessment Working Group II summary for policy makers was approved. The original wording of a key paragraph concluded “with very high confidence” that anthropogenic warming over the last three decades has had a discernible influence on many physical and biological systems.  After prolonged debate and manoeuverings, in order to gain the required consensus the meeting had to accept Chinese and Saudi Arabian insistence that “very high confidence” be downgraded to “high confidence”.  No science was advanced to justify the downgrade.

Schneider reflects on the ways in which over the years he and his colleagues have been “the targets of personal attacks and subject to false reporting, biased interpretations paid for by lobbies and big business, and other violations of media ethics.” On the question of “balance” which has led to reporting of climate science in terms of two polar-opposite sides he comments that the science is not like this; it is mostly the case of a spectrum of potential outcomes and the scientific assessment which accords them their relative credibility. “Perspective” is a better guide for serious journalism than “balance.”

An interesting sidelight is shed on denier tactics by Schneider’s account of the campaign DuPont sanctioned against the science and scientists who announced concern for the ozone layer in 1985. They sponsored a lengthy visit to the US by a British denier, Richard Scores, who called the ozone-depletion theory “a science fiction tale…a load of rubbish…utter nonsense.” Full page attack ads in major newspapers cited him and others to the effect that it was all theory and no facts and misguided hysterical scientists behind a scare.  Schneider comments that it was an object lesson of what was soon enough to come from the coal, oil, and automobile industries over global warming.

I found his memoir a lively and illuminating account of how a new science developed and rapidly proved to be one of overwhelming significance for humanity and the species with which we share the planet. There was plenty of argument between scientists along the way, as his narrative reveals. The science has had to make its way as science should, subject to empirical testing and peer debate. Its findings have carried serious implications for human response and provoked vigorous opposition from vested interests. Schneider himself has been described by Senator James Inhofe as the father of the greatest environmental hoax. He protested in reply that he had a thousand equally deserving colleagues.

The final chapter sums up. Two critical challenges continue.  One is the protection of the planetary commons for our posterity and the conservation of nature.  The other is solutions to deal fairly with those particularly hard hit by the impacts of climate change and national and international climate policies.  Schneider’s coupling of these issues is typical of the book as a whole and the life it recounts. But a troubling disquiet remains.  The matter is clouded for the public by ideologists and special interests who deliberately misframe the climate debate as uncertain, recruiting some sceptical nonclimate scientists to back them up and persuading a confused media that little is yet proven. Greed and short-term thinking – “me first” behaviour – motivates them. That is no surprise, but what  worries Schneider is how many decent people are still taken in by it.  “Can democracy survive complexity?” is the question that keeps him awake at night, he confesses.  However it’s not his last word and the book concludes with a plug for honest and transparent dialogue so that we all understand what is really at stake and a consideration of the steps he sees needing to be taken to develop effective climate policy.