Tag: Book reviews

Solar

Solar

Novelist Ian McEwan is fully aware of the dangers of climate change and concerned that renewable energy options be deployed with all possible urgency. His  memorable article in the Guardian in November 2008 makes that very clear. In 2005 he went with a group of artists and scientists to the Arctic to spend time on board a ship frozen into a fjord, a group, he says, “dedicated to understanding the effects of global warming on the remote poles, and asking ourselves what we as artists might do.” He writes about the experience in a prologue to the book Global Sustainability –- A Nobel Cause which arose out of the Potsdam Nobel symposium he was invited to in 2007.

We’ve known for some time that climate change would feature in his new novel, Solar, and wondered how. Comedy is the way he has chosen to come at so serious a subject. Climate change hovers in the background of the comic narrative around the central character.

Michael Beard is a middle aged Nobel laureate who received his prize for the work he did as a theoretical physicist in one brilliant summer in his youth.  Since receiving his leaureate he has for two decades done no work of consequence, but taken a variety of assorted tasks appropriate to his celebrity status.  Official roles with a stipend attached are his preference.

Beard is short, overweight and balding.  But the clever scientist holds attraction for a good number of women, and they certainly attract him.  His fifth marriage is coming to an end when the book opens in 2000.  He has numerous affairs whether married or not, and forthcoming sexual arrangements are never far from his mind. He is overweight because he can’t resist food.  He drinks large quantities of alcohol.  He is self-centred and self-indulgent.  McEwan himself sums it up in a television interview: “I made him rather fat and gross and rather cunning and thieving and lying and above all greedy.”

Not a very promising focus for reflection on climate change.  However McEwan deftly weaves strands of climate change concern into the narrative of Beard’s far from admirable but often highly amusing life.  This isn’t the place for a review of the novel as a literary work – there are plenty of those available elsewhere – but I’ll try to indicate some of what struck me as climate change commentary in the course of my very enjoyable read of the novel.

Early in the book Beard  is largely unperturbed by climate change. He’s not wholly sceptical. He knows the basic physics.  But he sees it as one of those background issues which governments can be expected to address and take action on.  He’s suspicious and dismissive of talk about peril or calamity.  In fact his mind is on other things and he doesn’t really take time to think about climate change.  At this point he struck me as fairly representative of a not inconsiderable sector of intelligent people who simply don’t focus on the question long enough to be disturbed by it. The indulgences which preoccupy Beard may be somewhat gross by normal standards, but they fit quite well into familiar societal patterns which preclude serious attention to serious matters.

Later in the novel Beard has had a change. Things are happening, thanks not to himself, but to the persistence of a young scientist at the renewable energy Centre that Beard nominally heads.  The young man had seen in Beard’s early Nobel work implications for a form of renewable energy which will use the power of the sun to perform artificial photosynthesis, to make cheap hydrogen and oxygen out of water, with the gases recombined at night in a fuel cell to drive a turbine. (McEwan is here drawing on the work of Daniel Nocera at MIT). After the bizarre accidental death of the young scientist Beard inherits a folder inscribed with his name in which the young man has placed all the relevant calculations of the process.  The attention Beard refused him during his life he eventually obtained after death when the older man finally read his work. As a result Beard emerges in 2005 as heavily engaged in plans to attract investment support for this new renewable energy.  In a notable passage in the novel he delivers a remarkable speech to a gathering of sceptical fund managers and investment specialists in London.  The need for renewable energy is set out with compelling clarity.  Never mind that the speech comes from an such unsatisfactory protagonist – McEwan gives his character’s scientific intelligence full range. And provides him with an audience on which it is largely wasted, for the vigorous culture of irrationalist denial has been nurtured in the solid institutions of the City.  In one luminous sequence McEwan captures both the promise of escape from the now disastrous energy path on which civilisation has depended and the thick-headed rejection of that promise in favour of business as usual. McEwan may have been cautious of didacticism, but he found in this passage a way of conveying the urgency and frustration that attends an understanding of climate change.

On to 2009 and at last Beard and his business partner are ready to launch the first project in New Mexico in which the new technology will go into production at a modest but useful level.  The necessary millions of dollars have been found, the components put to the test and everything assembled on site. On the verge of the grand opening his partner, no scientist but an excellent organiser and raiser of funds, is unnerved by all the talk he is hearing from business people and white coats on TV that the scientists have got it all wrong but don’t dare admit it.  The rise in temperature so far is negligible and now the planet is cooling.  McEwan manages to pack in most of the denialist hype which gathered strength prior to Copenhagen and make it sound like a genuine conversation.  The same goes for Beard’s scientific elucidation for his friend’s benefit.  The climax of the conversation is brilliant: “Toby, listen. It’s a catastrophe.  Relax!”   The passage is a portrayal of the extraordinary persistence of denial and the ease with which it has been able to percolate through some presumably educated sections of society.

The novel ends in a shambles befitting the life of its central character.  There’s no grand message for the world.  McEwan commented in the TV interview linked to above that novelists who try to sell too strongly a moral message usually find their novels are dead on their feet.  He clearly escaped that fate.  But along the way he fed in a good deal of the serious  concern to which he has given voice outside his fiction. The paradox that it should come through a character who personifies a good deal that is wrong with societal habits is part of the comedy.

We may expect to see writers and artists increasingly treating climate change in their work. It looms so large over society that it can’t be neglected by those who help shape our culture. Hopefully they will help prepare us for the acceptance which surely can’t be delayed for very much longer, and also help us to maintain a decent sense of humanity as we face up to the problematic future we have prepared for ourselves.

Requiem for a Species

Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change

Eighteen months ago Clive Hamilton finally admitted to himself that we’re not going to act with the urgency needed to meet the action required by the science.  Hence his new book Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change .

It is now too late to prevent far-reaching changes in the earth’s climate. An  optimistic outlook could see global emissions peaking in 2020 then declining by 3 percent each year, with emissions in rich countries falling by 6-7 percent.  It’s not enough.  Drawing particularly on the 2008 paper by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows from the UK’s Tyndall Centre Hamilton concludes that this would see the greenhouse gas concentration rise over the century to 650 parts per million, far in excess of the ‘safe’ 450 ppm talked about. Four degrees of warming is more likely by the century’s end than two degrees. The assumptions on which international negotiations and national policies are proceeding have no foundation in the way in which the Earth’s climate system actually behaves.

After that grim assessment of the science Hamilton turns to topics for which he is well known through previous writing, as he seeks to explain why we failed to respond in time to the threat.  The first is growth fetishism.  All of the arguments for the sanctity of growth have been marshalled to resist measures to cut carbon emissions. Even the small decreases in GDP growth posited by Nicholas Stern if we take measures to reduce emissions are too much for governments to contemplate.  In the rich countries growth has become an unreasoning obsession.  Hamilton has no argument with growth to lift people out of poverty, but notes that in China and India the process is creating a vast army of middle-class consumers, like their counterparts in the West unreflective materialists whose desires are insatiable.

The consumer self is his next topic: “…our individual sense of self has become bound up with how we consume.” This makes the task of persuading citizens of affluent countries to change their behaviour in response to the climate crisis more intractable. When we ask the affluent to change their consumption behaviour we are asking of them much more than we realise. The campaign to maintain a livable climate may be a war against our own sense of who we are. This is not unfamiliar ground.  I always read it with dismay and, I confess, a pinch of scepticism.  Part of me thinks (or is it hopes?) that if people really understand what is at stake most of them would be able to transcend their consumer self. Hamilton is made of sterner stuff.

He moves on to considering the many forms of denial. For the roots of climate denial he turns to American conservatism’s anxiety over national sovereignty and disquiet at environmentalism’s destabilisation of the idea of progress and mastery over nature. This is the context for the break from their mainstream science colleagues of three prominent physicists who joined the anti-environment movement in the 1980s. Frederick Seitz, Robert Jarrow and William Nierenberg founded the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984. Initially a Washington think tank devoted to defending Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme, in the 1990s it moved to attacking climate change science, and Exxon began providing funding. Various other groups, especially The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition also funded by Exxon and other oil companies, have since joined the campaign. Climate denial and political conservatism have become entwined, at least in the US. Neo-conservatives do not accept the elevation of matters of fact over matters of belief.

On the personal level denial is an understandable part of our psychology, which has made it easier for the organised campaign of denialism to succeed. Hamilton writes of the fear of uncertainty and of the difficulties humans have in responding to risk through cognitive processing rather than immediate feelings. He covers some maladaptive strategies for coping such as downplaying the threat, pushing it into the vague future, escaping through pleasure-seeking, resting in blame-shifting. Optimism comes under scrutiny: the observations of climate change have taken such an alarming turn in the last few years, and global action remains so inadequate, that maintaining optimism seems more and more like a disconnection from reality.

But setting aside talk about consciousness are there not prosaic things that can be done immediately to avoid climate disruption?  Hamilton considers three of those commonly advanced. Carbon capture and storage he dismisses as a fossil industry delaying tactic. It’s expensive, it’s too slow to be of use and it’s not being funded by the industry itself but by governments. Renewable energy combined with energy efficiency is feasible technically and at reasonable cost, but he fears that no government is willing to undertake the emergency response needed over the next decade. Nuclear energy he has no objection to in principle but questions its costs and timing.  The fall-back of climate engineering is fraught with dangers. A unilateral deployment of geoengineering techniques is a frightening prospect and should be pre-empted by international agreement.

Perhaps the most sobering chapter of the book is a short account of a conference Hamilton attended in Oxford in September 2009 when some 100 climate scientists met to discuss the implications of a 4 degrees global change for people, eco-systems and the earth-system.  When the conference was mooted the objective was to explore the end of the probability distribution that people don’t like talking about. By the time the conference came round 4 degrees had moved to the middle of the probability distribution. This would be hotter than any time since the Miocene era 25 million years ago. We are staring into the abyss. “The future looks impossible,” said Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre.

However that future has to be faced. We will have to allow ourselves to enter a phase of desolation and hopelessness, “in short, to grieve”. Hamilton explores the likely elements of our mourning for a lost future. That is the stage of Despair. Beyond that he hopes for a resurgence of resourcefulness and selflessness, for the emergence of values of moderation, humility, and respect for the natural world. That stage he calls Accept. His third stage is Act. Here he speaks of vigorous political engagement to build democracies that can ensure the best defences against a more hostile climate, protect the poor and vulnerable and restrain the rich and powerful who may well try to control dwindling resources for themselves.

It’s a sombre picture.  Whether Hamilton has correctly located the reasons for our failure to meet the crisis may be arguable. There’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter. The weight of the book for me was not so much in its analyses of society as in the author’s acceptance that we are not going to avoid major and frightening climate disruption, his description of the turmoil that such a recognition involves for the psyche, and his sketching of how we may best carry on into a diminished human future. This thread in the book is less formulated than the critiques of society, but will nevertheless carry a lot of interest for others who feel themselves on the brink of hopelessness.  Not least because Hamilton sees things worth doing and ways worth being on the other side of despair.

The Lomborg Deception

Is it worth spending a whole book dissecting the writing of Bjørn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist”?  Certainly not in terms of the quality of Lomborg’s argument, which simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  But Lomborg’s writing has been permitted to exercise a widespread and harmful influence. For that reason Howard Friel’s painstaking book The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming represents time well and usefully spent.

Friel identifies two strains in Lomborg’s work: his “theorem”, that though global warming is happening and is human-induced it is far from a catastrophe; his “corollary” that there is therefore little need to incur the costs of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to the extent urged by concerned experts. Friel concentrates on Lomborg’s two books The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007). The first book covered a range of environmental concerns presented as an exaggerated “litany” of bad news generated by environmentalists. The second focused exclusively on climate change.

Friel spends most of his space on a detailed examination of Cool It. Lomborg has no hesitation in claiming that scientists exaggerate the effects of global warming, and has a large number of end notes supposedly backing his claims with reference to the sources of his evidence. By examining those supporting notes and citations in considerable detail Friel exposes the flimsiness of Lomborg’s claims. They are grounded, to say the least, in bad data. Indeed if Friel’s tracking of the referencing is accurate they are hardly grounded at all.

Take Lomborg’s claim that there will be only 12 inches of sea level rise this century. Of this he attributes 9 inches to thermal expansion.  He references the 9 inches to Figure 10.6.1 in Working Group 1 (WG1) of the 2007 IPCC assessment report (AR4).  No such figure can be found, says Friel.  But assume Lomborg meant Section 10.6.1.  It contains three projections (using three SRES scenarios) of thermal expansion. They range between 4 and 15 inches. Lomborg apparently chooses a rough median and presents it as an unwarrantably precise estimate.

The remaining 3 inches of Lomborg’s 12 inch rise come from melting glaciers and ice caps. Here he references Figure 10.6.3 in WG1 of AR4. Again there is no such figure, and he probably meant Section 10.6.3 titled Glaciers and Ice Caps; nowhere in it or its subsections can Friel find any substantiation of the 3 inches claim. Lomborg then referenced a claim that Greenland is expected to contribute 1.4 inches by itself to, we assume, Section 10.6.4. With its subsections it spans five pages, which do not report any 1.4 inch expectation from Greenland. Lomborg’s further claim that Antarctica will be accumulating ice as a result of increased precipitation and consequently contribute a 2-inch reduction in sea level rise is also referenced to Section 10.6.4 which offers no such report.

“Thus,” writes Friel, “Lomborg referenced only these IPCC figures to itemize his assertion of a one-foot sea-level rise, even though none of these sources can be found in the IPCC assessment report.”

Friel finds similar loose sourcing to most of Lomborg’s claims. Polar bears are not threatened. Climate change will reduce human mortality due to an offsetting reduction in cold-related deaths. Extreme weather events will be much fewer than predicted by environmentalists. The WHO exaggerates excess fatalities due to global warming. Food concerns related to global warming are vastly overplayed – “we will be able to feed the world ever better”.  $4 billion annually will be enough to bring water and sanitation to those in the world who lack these essential services.

Friel offers frequent useful statements of the scientific consensus on many of these issues against which Lomborg sets himself as an authority empowered in some extraordinary way to see the exaggeration of which he asserts a large scientific community is guilty.

The role of the IPCC, as set out in 1988 by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation, emphasises scientific objectivity, policy neutrality, balanced geographic representation, and consensus. By the time its reports are issued, Friel comments, one might conclude that its product would embody a scientifically sound consensus middle ground among its 2,500 contributors and reviewers. He marvels that Cool It, which reflects none of these characteristics and which throughout asserts unsubstantiated claims that are completely at odds with the IPCC consensus can yet be described as representing “the practical middle” (Wall Street Journal) or “the pragmatic center” (New York Times). Lomborg has successfully competed with the IPCC in the US. Friel provides a telling analogy: “…the favourable coverage of Lomborg and his books are to global warming what the triple-A ratings for mortgage-backed securities were to the US financial system – misguided seals of approval with catastrophic consequences.” More catastrophic, he notes, in the case of climate change than in the case of financial systems which can presumably be repaired. His verdict on the part played by publishers and journalists: “Lomborg’s success largely reflects an ability of elite publishing houses and news organizations to contruct an alternative but counterfeit network of knowledge about an issue of the highest public importance.”

In the light of his thorough scrutiny of Lomborg’s claimed sources Friel considers it legitimate to maintain that Lomborg’s books are an assault on science, as Scientific American did when it convened a forum of distinguished scientists to write a rebuttal to The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001. Friel reports this and other authoritative responses to Lomborg’s earlier book in some detail. He also asks whether the success of Lomborg’s books in a cultural sense is a manifestation of a broader “assault on reason”, described by Al Gore in his book of that title as a systematic breakdown of rational consideration of the major challenges facing the US and the world.

There’s probably little reason to expect that a book like Friel’s will put a dent in the popularity Lomborg commands. Denial is rampant at present. And the book is not a light read. However it has elicited a lengthy response from Lomborg himself, to which Friel has replied on his publisher’s website.  He comments there that his previous experience in the hermeneutics of deception mostly dealt with books and texts that sought to justify war. “Lomborg’s books are no worse then those, but they are no better. Perhaps twenty or fifty years from now, if and when the fuller impacts of man-made global warming are more apparent, people might argue that they were worse. This is because at least wars usually end whereas global warming past a certain point probably won’t.” Which is all the more reason to persist with trying to focus public attention on the real science and expose the falsity of confident deniers and delayers. And good reason to welcome what Howard Friel’s book has contributed to that exposure.

Seeing Further

 

Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

The name of Bill Bryson attracted me and I obtained through the library a copy of his new book Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, only to find that he is the editor, not the author. But he has done a splendid job as editor, collecting contributions from 21 authors, in an eclectic mix with room for novelists as well as professors. I hadn’t thought to be mentioning the book on Hot Topic, but there are three or four chapters which touch on climate change and which seemed worth reporting.

Novelist Maggie Gee provides a chapter of nicely modulated writing on the ways in which writers explore the possible end of the world and what draws them to do so.  Some of her own novels have been described as apocalyptic and she comments that at a conscious level she uses the threat of apocalypse “to re-focus attention  on the short-term miracle of what we have, this relatively peaceful and temperate present where the acts of reading and writing are possible.” But she is aware that fears of climate change apocalypse are real enough. Contrasting the regular engagement of the Royal Society in the climate change debate with the quietude of her own Royal Society of Literature (of which she is a Vice-President) a little further down the Thames, she posits that writers are like most people in not fully believing it will affect their lives. Those who do take it seriously “are thought slightly mad, or over-intense, unlike the sensible majority who just somehow know things will always go on as they do today.” She follows with a perceptive observation of the resulting inhibitions of climate change believers. “It’s like a religion: don’t bring it up. Belief seems like a claim to virtue, a holier-than-thou-ness which will annoy others. Thus some of us, myself included, become cowards, or lazy.”

That said, she expresses her admiration for the “terrible striving” she sees in some young people, but also her pity and her urge to say to them ‘Be kinder to yourself’. Some of the young “are already assuming all the costs and allowing themselves none of the benefits of life on this planet, whereas others, older and much, much richer, have taken all the benefits and paid none of the costs.”

She offers some interesting comparisons between writers and scientists. Scientists have to vouch for the truth and solidity of what they say, whereas artists “are protected by the worn trench-coat of irony”. [Great line! GR] On the plus side for climate scientists, they have a clear part to play. They are useful. “Writers very often do not feel useful.” Nevertheless they have something to offer, including this: “We can try to defamiliarise the present, make our readers realise afresh how marvellous our living planet is.”

There are also similarities in the roles of scientists and writers. Both have the opportunity to look beyond the demands of the present out to the wide web of life and to the future in its many possible forms.  If we refuse that attempt we run the risk of losing everything. “The laboratories and libraries that we need and love to pursue our crafts are some of the first things that would be lost with the collapse of civilisation.”

Stephen Schneider’s chapter tackles the scientific uncertainties in climate change. Uncertainty has to be part of the science because it is concerned with the future. The question is how large the uncertainties are. Some of them centre around the so-called climate sensitivity, often estimated as the temperature increase due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels of about 280 ppm. The IPCC offers a likely range of 2-4.5 degrees, with a 5-17 percent chance of it being higher and a ‘best guess’ of 3 degrees. Not easily communicated to policy-makers and the public.

It’s also difficult to explain how systems science gets done. Traditional ‘falsification’ controlled experiments are not possible. “What we can do is assess where the preponderance of evidence lies and assign confidence levels to various conclusions.” It would be nice to stick only with empirical data, but the best that can be done is to continually update the underlying data behind predictions and refine predictions as required.

This means that scientists, and policy-makers, grappling with climate science impacts are dealing with risk management. Judging about acceptable and unacceptable risks is a value judgment  which many traditional scientists are uncomfortable with.  Schneider is one of them, “but I am more uncomfortable ignoring the problem altogether”.

The matter is complicated by another feature of systems science difficult to manage: the possibility of ‘surprises’ in future global climate, such as tipping points which lead to unusually rapid changes of state.

Schneider explains how the IPCC worked out a standardised quantitative scale to treat the uncertainties –- low confidence, medium confidence, high confidence and very high confidence, likely, and so on. The aim is to better inform the risk management decisions of policy-makers.

Not all is uncertain in the science. It can be regarded as settled that warming is occurring and virtually settled that human activities are the primary driver of recent changes.  The uncertainties are about how severe warming and its impacts will be in the future. These uncertainties have to be managed rather than mastered.

Oliver Morton in a chapter on Earth’s energy flows and the cycles of the biosphere, comments on the use of ancient sunlight stored in fossil form to drive the engines of industry and civilisation. In itself the amount of energy thus liberated is tiny by planetary scales. But the warming it results in is, in terms of energy flows, about one hundred times larger than the amount of energy released by the fossil fuels.

Energy from fossil fuels ties the flow of energy to the material flow of the carbon cycle in a deeply damaging way. We must simply find other flows to tap. Energy flows through the winds, the currents of the oceans, the rivers, the growing of the grass. It flows out of the ground and down from the sky. Energy of all sorts flows through the world and it’s not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity.

Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society since 2005, looks ahead to the next fifty years. He’s not sanguine.  Along with an exploding human population and its need for food, energy and resources, and along with the extinction threats hovering over biodiversity, he sets the threat from a warmer world and the significant probability that it will trigger a grave and irreversible global trend as in rising sea levels or runaway release of methane in the tundra.  He wants to see plenty of citizen scientists, measuring up to the social responsibility that goes with their scientific work. He ends with a vision of the vast changes in the Earth in the last one millionth part of its history, a few thousand years, including the anomalously fast rise in the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s been an unprecedented ‘fever’ less than half way through the Earth’s life.  It will need some wise choices to steer to a safe outcome.

[GR adds: Martin Rees is visiting NZ this month as the guest of the Royal Society of NZ to give two Rutherford Memorial Lectures, in Christchurch on March 22 and Wellington on March 23. Details here. I’d love a report on the Wellington lecture from someone!]

Global Sustainability – A Nobel Cause

Global Sustainability

In late 2007 I kidded myself that I was present at a gathering of Nobel Laureates as I spent some hours watching a website video record of their proceedings. They had assembled with a variety of other distinguished experts for a three-day symposium on global sustainability. I can remember being very impressed, particularly by some of the developments in energy technology which were reported to the gathering, but also more generally by the wide intellectual compass demonstrated by the participants. Climate change and energy generation figured strongly in the symposium. It concluded with a strongly expressed Memorandum which I assumed would by now have been consigned to the archive of such declarations, only to be seen by those with an interest in fossicking through the unheeded warnings of the past. Not yet. The Potsdam Institute, organiser of the symposium, has in the intervening time been gathering essays from the contributors and has now published them in a substantial book Global Sustainability – A Nobel Cause.

It isn’t possible to report on all 33 essays, but I’ll mention a few. Murray Gell-Mann, the discoverer of the building blocks he called quarks, was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1969. Now 80 years old he’s still working at the Santa Fe Institute he helped to found. He describes it as a place where it is the rule rather than the exception to have transdisciplinary problems studied by self-organized teams of people originally trained in many different specialties. In the opening essay to this volume he writes of the importance of what he calls a “crude look at the whole”, and of supplementing specialized studies of policy problems with serious attempts to unite them, albeit with an inevitable degree of simplification. He wants to use the term sustainable in an inclusive way, not restricted to environmental, demographic and economic matters, but referring also to political, military, diplomatic, social and institutional or governance issues. He indicates a wide range of interlinked transitions which will be required if the world is to switch to greater sustainability: demographic, to a stable human population; technological, to supply human needs with lower environmental impact; economic, to quality taking the place of quantity (other than for the alleviation of poverty); social, to a society with less inequality; institutional, to better cope with conflict and the management of the biosphere;  informational, to the readier acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and understanding; ideological, to a combination of localised loyalties with a ‘planetary consciousness’.

The section of the volume which carries essays on technological innovation and energy security includes two from Nobel laureates.  Walter Kohn won the 1998 prize for chemistry. He straightforwardly outlines the necessity and practicality of solar and wind energy which he sees overtaking oil and natural gas by 2021.  Alan Heeger who won the 2000 prize for chemistry describes the exciting work on low-cost plastic solar cells in large quantities using ‘photovoltaic inks’ and printing technology to produce flexible plastic sheets of the cells.  The section includes illuminating essays on how new super grids and smart grids can work to enhance the feasibility of renewable energy generation on a large scale. Another essay of interest looks at possible paths to carbon-negative energy systems, focusing on the hydro-thermal carbonisation of biomass which could be done in small dispersed operations on much less than industrial scale.

Throughout the book there is frequent acknowledgement of the necessity of tackling poverty eradication at the same time as climate change. Nitin Desai of India puts it clearly: “The two challenges are now so connected that coping with one requires that we cope also with the other. That is what sustainable development is all about – how poverty eradication and environmental protection can be mutually supportive.”

In a section on a global contract between science and society John Sulston, joint winner of the 2002 Nobel prize for physiology/medicine, argues that the hyper-competitive stance that has been the norm in international relations will be disastrous for the problems now facing us. By sharing and acting upon our knowledge we have the opportunity to mitigate climate change. The great danger is that each of us tends to betray the group by striving for advantages over others, and if we persist on this course we and our planet will suffer dire consequences.

The Memorandum adopted by the symposium gathers up the themes explored by the many contributors. “We are standing at a moment in history when a Great Transformation is needed to respond to the immense threat to our planet. This transformation must begin immediately and is strongly supported by all present at the Potsdam Nobel Laureate Symposium.”  Climate protection ambitions appear to be on a collision course with the predominant growth paradigm that disconnects human welfare from the capacity of the planet to sustain growth. Yet the development needs of the poorer countries must be met. The great transformation is a thorough re-invention of our industrial metabolism. An awesome challenge, the memorandum  acknowledges, but to meet it we now have an incredibly advanced system of knowledge production that can be harnessed, in principle, to co-generate that transformation.

After listing key elements for climate stabilisation and energy security, the memorandum concludes with a plea for a new global contract between science and society, highlighting the need for a multi-national innovation programme that surpasses the national crash programmes of the past such as the Manhattan or Apollo projects. It calls for better global communication about natural or social sustainability crises and for a global initiative on the advancement of sustainability science, education and training. “The best young minds, especially those of women, need to be motivated to engage in interdisciplinary problem-solving, based on ever enhanced disciplinary excellence.”

The trenchant final chapter of the book written by Klaus Töpfer, a former Federal Minister of the Environment under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, places the memorandum in the context of the dramatic economic crisis that began shortly after the symposium.

“More than ever before, the relationship between economic development and stability, and the integrity of the ecosystems in our world are becoming evident. This global economic crisis is a declaration of bankruptcy of the ‘short-term world’…It is also a declaration of bankruptcy by a society that subsidizes its ‘wealth’ by externalizing the main part of the costs linked to production and consumption, imposing them on coming generations, on human beings living far away, and on nature’s capital.”

Against this background he hails the Potsdam Memorandum as an historical document of continuing significance, focused on the dramatically destabilized economic and ecological world of today. “It not only describes the problems and formulates the challenges; this memorandum also suggests the solutions. The utmost must be done to apply these recommendations to day-to-day decisions in this crisis-stricken world.”

Note: The book is available for free download.