Tag: book review

Climate Wars

Climate Wars

Gwynne Dyer’s new book Climate Wars explores the all-important political dimension of addressing climate change. Military history is Dyer’s speciality. One origin of this book was his dawning awareness that, in a number of the great powers, climate-change scenarios are already playing a large role in the military planning process. The other factor persuading him to write the book was the realisation that the first and most important impact of climate change on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply.

He produces scenarios of his own to introduce each of the book’s seven chapters, positing in coming decades dangerous geopolitical developments in response to food shortages, with massive levels of human deaths. The scenarios range through many eventualities: dangerous confrontation on the Sino-Russian border;  nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan; the collapse of the European Union under the stress of south-north mass migration; a lethally effective border barrier between the US and Mexico with disastrous consequences for Mexico and the alienation of Hispanic-Americans within the US; a unilateral geo-engineering project gone wrong; and much else. His final scenario is different in that it looks much further ahead to a possible major extinction as a result of global warming effects on the oceans, drawing on the hypotheses in paleontologist Peter Ward’s recent book Under A Green Sky.

Dyer claims no certainty for his scenarios of course, but there is no denying their underlying credibility. As the main chapters of the book make apparent, the climate changes on which the scenarios are based are inescapable if we carry on with business as usual.  The book is as much about climate science as about the political and strategic consequences of climate change. Dyer is conversant with the major themes of  current science, and well understands the feedback mechanisms which threaten to accelerate the warming already under way.  He serves the general reader well in his this respect. He knows how to explain to lay people the complexities in which the experts deal.

He also spends a good deal of space canvassing mitigation possibilities and the likelihood or otherwise of their being adopted.  “We Can Fix This…” says one chapter, “…But Probably Not in Time” says the next, which is why he goes on to consider geo-engineering measures as an emergency fall-back option if the political process doesn’t deliver the goods on time.

As a respected journalist he has had access to numerous scientists, soldiers, bureaucrats and politicians. Extracts from their interviews are a core element of the book.  They lift his material clearly out of the realm of journalistic conjecture into the sober realms of the everyday working life of those he speaks with. The interviews have the further advantage of being recent and the book consequently takes us to where things stand right now. There is little doubt that they are worse than hitherto predicted.

Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, Dyer looks for realism. His final chapter centres partly on James Lovelock whom he sees as the most important figure in both the life sciences and the climate sciences for the past half-century; indeed he has him up there with a figure like Charles Darwin in the pantheon of scientific heroes.  But he finds the resolve to differ from Lovelock’s belief that irreparable damage has already been done. Dyer’s hope is that we will move sufficiently quickly towards decarbonising our economies to avoid the worst prospects of conflict and famine portrayed in his scenarios. He reflects on the small miracle that “at exactly the same time when it became clear we have to stop burning fossil fuels, a wide variety of other technologies for generating energy became available.”  But to make use of the opportunity we have within the next few decades, we will need, he concludes, the grown-up values of self-restraint and the ability to cooperate. One hopes this is not too much to ask.

Six Degrees

This posting is based on a Waikato Times column written in July.

The Royal Society in the UK awarded its 2008 science writing prize to Mark Lynas for his global warming book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Warming Planet. I found the book telling when I read it last year, and it was good to see it receive this confirmation.

Lynas’s first book High Tide, published in 2004, grew out of three years visiting parts of the globe where the signs of global warming were becoming evident – Alaska, Tuvalu, Mongolia, Peru, the US.  Six Degrees had a different genesis. It is the result of many months in the Radcliffe Science Library at Oxford trawling through scientific journals to find the peer-reviewed papers on which the book is entirely based.  The source material ranges from computer model projections to studies of climate in the past. Lynas is not a scientist, but he makes it his business to adequately understand and interpret what the scientists have written in their specialist fields.

Sceptics often scoff at computer models as somehow fiddled in advance, but Lynas points out that they are based not on subjective judgements by their constructors but on the fundamental laws of physics.  They have grown increasingly sophisticated and the insight they offer into likely future conditions on the planet is something humanity has never had access to before.  One check on their accuracy is ‘hindcasting’ the 20th century, and some of the most powerful recent models have done this with almost unerring accuracy.  Not that Lynas suggests that they are infallible in their forecasts.

Six Degrees is a highly readable narrative for the general reader, tracking through what changes can likely be expected from each degree of global warming from one degree through to six degrees, the upper limit for worst case scenarios.

Even at what may seem comparatively low rises of one or two degrees centigrade he finds plenty to cause alarm. A few of his examples:  possible desertification and abandonment of agriculture over millions of square kilometres in the US, an extremely hot and drought-ridden Mediterranean Europe, an ice-free Arctic ocean with implications still difficult to understand, the bleaching and likely death of many coral reefs, major loss of food production in India, serious population displacement in Bangladesh. On through three and four degrees the book points to desertification intensifying in many places, water supply severely declining in Pakistan, the Amazon rainforest dying, far more of Australia burning and suffering serious drought, the West Antarctic ice sheet facing collapse, sea levels rising threateningly. Five and six degrees hardly bear contemplating as the possibility is faced of methane hydrates on subsea continental shelves becoming destabilised and venting into the atmosphere, adding an enormous feedback to global warming.

As a writer for the general public Lynas doesn’t shrink from putting emotional depth into his analysis.  He explains in a Guardian column: “If I’ve read a paper about coral bleaching or precipitation trends in the Sahel, I need to be able to describe what this means in the real world – grey weed creeping over once-vibrant coral reefs, and Sudanese herders struggling to feed their children as their livestock starves around them and a dust-storm looms on the horizon.”   However he sees his first duty as accurately representing what he has read in the scientific literature.   The Royal Society judges are clear that he has met this test. They state that the book provides a good overview of the latest science on the issue. An interesting response came from  Eric Steig, one of the contributing scientists to the Real Climate website, when he reviewed the book in Conservation Magazine. Initially he had assumed from news reports that the book was alarmist and probably not worth reading; however, after reading it he reported it firmly based on published scientific literature and nowhere exceeding those bounds. Alarming, yes, but not alarmist.

There is no escaping that the science is alarming. That is why this issue is of such overwhelming importance. Yet like most writers on the subject Lynas hopes that we can yet avoid the worst prospects. There is already unavoidable further warming ahead of between 0.5 and 1 degree Celsius, but it is possible that we might manage a ‘safe landing’ within the 1-2 degree corridor if appropriate action is begun now to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This is the point at which the question moves from science into the realm of the political. We largely know how the needed reductions could be achieved.  The question is whether we find the collective will to do it.  The fact that that is still an open question indicates the full reality of the science has not dawned for enough of us.   Books like Six Degrees need wide readership. Hopefully the Royal Society prize will assist that.

It is worth noting that Six Degrees was published in America by National Geographic, which has also made a television documentary based on the book and broadcast on the National Geographic channel internationally. On a lighter note Lynas also achieved minor fame as a somewhat younger man in 2001 by throwing a cream pie at Bjorn Lomborg, the ‘sceptical environmentalist’. “I wanted to put a Baked Alaska in his smug face in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice and worsening effects on animal and bird life.”

Ten technologies to save the planet

As the news on climate change becomes increasingly serious it is all the more important to affirm that the problem has solutions provided the world applies them soon enough.

Prominent UK environment writer Chris Goodall surveys some of those solutions in a well-researched fashion in his new book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet.  In combination he shows them adequate to the deep reductions of global greenhouse gas emissions needed over the coming decades.

On the renewable electricity front he explores wind power, solar energy and the tides and waves of the oceans.  Where fossil fuel continues to be used for electricity he considers carbon capture and storage a viable technology and one which carries with it the additional possibility of extracting carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere for sequestration. Combined heat and power technologies through fuel cells and district heating plants using biomass offer significant emission reductions. House insulation and airtightness, including refurbishment of existing houses, are easy gains.  On transport, he points to the fast advances in technology for battery driven electric cars, and to the large number of companies working on developing biofuels from cellulose. Wood part-combusted to make charcoal and dug into the ground both sequesters carbon and in many soils improves fertility. Finally, he details various better treatments of soil, trees and plants to improve their carbon-sink properties.

All the technologies Goodall canvasses already have solid indications of technical feasibility. Some of them, such as wind power, are in substantial operation. Together they present a credible world in which we could live in reasonable comfort and in a great deal more safety than our current path offers. There are further technologies, such as nuclear energy, which Goodall discounts but for which others make a strong case.

Altogether there is good reason to feel encouraged. We can decarbonise our energy and our industry.  We are not doomed to destruction for lack of alternatives.

Why then, in view of the utter urgency of the need, isn’t the world in general and New Zealand in particular getting on with it?  Goodall feels obliged to evaluate the technologies in terms of their cost relative to fossil fuel. But why should competitiveness with fossil fuel matter as much as it still seems to? We now understand that the continued burning of fossil fuel is dangerous for the human future. The fact that it may be cheaper in economic terms doesn’t lessen that danger.

Within a market economy, Goodall urges measures to put a price on carbon either through direct tax or through capped emissions trading schemes.  He points out that a high carbon price (he suggests US$50 per tonne) would make almost all the technologies in his book competitive very soon.  Against those who say the economy would be crippled he argues that in fact the impact on GDP will not be large.

But even if it were large, governments cannot allow the burning of fossil fuels to continue unhindered.  The new technologies have to be adopted as rapidly as possible – by regulation and subsidy if market signals are not sufficient.

Unfortunately, many politicians remain scientifically ignorant and vulnerable to vested interests. Our own new government is still dithering, possibly even back-pedalling, on the modest measures adopted in the emissions trading scheme.

The recent calm and impressive statement of President-elect Obama may herald a new urgency. Announcing that he planned to reduce US 1990 emissions by 80% by 2050 through a cap and trade system and direct government investment in clean energy, he concluded: “Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences, too serious.”

This column first appeared in the Waikato Times on 9 December 2008