Tag: Book reviews

The Weather Makers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterword:

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

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

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

Heatstroke

algae

Anthony Barnosky is a Berkeley University paleoecologist deeply concerned about what lies ahead for Earth’s ecological systems if we persist in heating the globe. His recently published book Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming explains his concerns. Global warming with its own method of ecosystem demolition has joined the three other factors — habitat loss, introduced species and population growth — by which human activity has impacted badly on ecologies.

Yes, climates have changed in the past and species and ecologies have changed with them.  Many scales of climate change have occurred, from slow tectonic to the fast changes embedded within glacial and inter-glacial times.  Why should an ecologist worry about today’s global warming which is just one more scale? Barnosky has two reasons: one is the rate of change, which is way faster than anything in the past, the other is that the new climate will be hotter than that in which homo sapiens and many other animal species evolved.

Barnosky’s book is packed with examples of what is already happening and what it points to. As the climate warms many species already have to move to survive.  He quotes the result of one survey which showed a set of 99 species of birds, butterflies and alpine herbs which within ten years had shifted on average 6.1 kilometres poleward or 6.1 metres upward in elevation. Dying out on mountain tops is the fate or likely fate of the latter. He traces many other factors, such as the subtle interactions between climate, vegetation, and reproductive success for species such as reindeer, or the change of climate conditions to favour the fungus which kills harlequin frogs – in the tropical mountains of Central America they are now dying in unprecedented numbers because of this new interaction between species. Synchronisations which have served some species well are no longer able to be relied on – marmots in the Colorado Rockies are coming out of hibernation earlier, but heavier snow is taking longer to melt and the green shoots the emaciated marmots need to feed on are not ready. In the ocean he details many instances of marine ecosystems under serious stress from the double whammy of traditional human impacts such as pollution and overfishing now followed by global warming. Corals are a clear example.

Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, Kruger Park in Africa and Tambopata Nature Reserve in Peru, are among places Barnosky selects for closer attention. Small mammal species in Yosemite have changed how they live in the park, in a way that indicates some may be on the way out. Amphibians in Yellowstone are in decline. In Kruger between 13 and 20 of the 87 mammal species there today are projected to disappear by 2080. The Tambopata rainforest, along with many rainforests throughout tropical South America, has a 75% chance of being mostly savannah by 2080.

Barnosky devotes a fascinating chapter to what began as his big moment of realisation in a deep cave in the Colorado mountains in 1985. That moment turned into a fifteen year project for four large institutions, more than two dozen scientists and hundreds of volunteers.  They retrieved thousands of fossils deposited over nearly a million years by bushy-tailed wood rats who have the convenient habit of collecting odd objects they find lying around and bring them back to their nests. Among their favourite items are bones, some of them encased in the pellets regurgitated by birds or defecated by carnivores. In the eight feet of excavated layers in that cave was an invaluable record of the changing makeup of local species through the climate changes of the Pleistocene. The story of how the various layers were interpreted and dated is another of those intricate detective operations which mark the scientific interpretation of so many of the clues from the past still embedded in discoverable form.

Barnosky is always considered in his appraisals.  He gives due weight to the resilience of ecologies, and nowhere rushes to judgment. But he thinks we are in a time of accelerated extinction of species, and warns that it could be very large indeed. There were already pressures enough driving us towards dwindling biodiversity.  Global warming increases greatly the speed of the train on its way to mass extinction.

A sober chapter discusses the possibility of climate change acting as a selective force to stimulate the building of new species.  In the past, times of slow climate change seem to correlate with bursts of speciation.  But Barnosky points out that climate change today is at a rate which outpaces mutation rates of most animal and and plant species by a far greater margin than we have ever seen. Recombination within gene pools offers some possibility of evolutionary change, but it is limited without sufficient mutation. At the end of this discussion, engrossing for any lay reader with an interest in evolutionary processes, he concludes: “Global warming is not only doing its part to diminish biodiversity substantially within a century or so, it is also limiting the future evolutionary potential of Earth.”

Barnosky nevertheless insists on hope.  His final chapter centres not only on slowing down global warming but also on a programme for wilderness protection.  First we need to keep what we already have – the 12% of Earth’s surface now protected in some fashion to preserve nature. Second, climate-connection corridors must be provided for species movement. Third, new initiatives are required to minimize high-impact human land use, to create marine-based reserves before it is too late, and to consider the conceptual division of reserves into two functions – one kind devoted to the preservation of individual species and certain assemblages of species, the other devoted to the preservation of wilderness.

The alternative for humanity is the technological “termite-life” of ecological loss.

Barnosky writes with an easy style, combining clarity with a near-conversational level of communication with the reader.  His book offers many insights into the nature of ecological communities and why it is that they matter so deeply.  It is also further evidence if we need it of how profound the effects of anthropogenic global warming are set to be if we do not change our ways.

Disagreeing with Hulme

Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity

Ultimately there’s an opacity in Mike Hulme’s recently published book Why We Disagree About Climate Change.  We are too much engaged with the idea of fighting climate change as a physical reality, he concludes. We are science-saturated but spiritually impoverished. We need to engage with climate change in ways which focus on what we want to achieve for ourselves and humanity.  Climate change is not an environmental problem to be solved so much as an idea which we can use to examine our cultural values and renegotiate our wider social goals about how and why we live on this planet.

Hulme is a climatologist who during the 1990s was actively engaged in the study of climate change, particularly in work on modelling.  He says that he accepts the reality of anthropogenic global warming and that its risks are important and serious.  From 1999 he spent seven years leading the Tyndall Centre, established as an interdisciplinary enterprise where scientists, economists, engineers and social scientists, work together to develop sustainable responses to climate change. He describes this as the time when he began to see that climate change meant very different things to different people, depending on their political, social and cultural settings. The book is largely an exploration of that phenomenon.

Early in the book Hulme seeks to delineate the space legitimately belonging to science and to point to its limits. He specifies three limits in particular. Science always speaks with a conditional voice. Further, when scientific knowledge becomes a public commodity it will have been shaped to some degree by the processes by which it emerges into the social world and through which is subsequently circulates.  Finally, we must not hide behind science when difficult ethical choices are called for. Some of our decisions will be beyond the reach of science.

Applied to climate change it’s not clear to me that any of this affects the core message of the science.  I don’t detect any undue certitude in the scientists I have read.  Uncertainties are usually highlighted, and insufficient knowledge recognised.  Certainly the science can receive some rough and ready treatment when the media fails to convey some of its complexities or hypes up some of the possibilities, but most people who take the subject seriously should be able to make allowance for that. And evading ethical decisions by appealing to the science is an accusation rather too easily made.  If science has been driven to the conclusion that our actions in burning fossil fuel are causing global warming and if some of the possible outcomes are threatening human well-being now and in the future, a fairly immediate ethical imperative surely follows. Much of what Hulme says about the scientific process is unexceptionable, but he presses it harder in relation to climate science than I would have thought current practice requires.  He is, for example, “uncomfortable that climate change is widely reported through the language of catastrophe and imminent peril”. Does this mean he considers there are no catastrophic possibilities associated with climate change?  No imminent peril for those living in low-lying river deltas or islands?  Is he accusing some scientists of overstatement? Or does he regard such a presentation as a distraction from the spiritual challenges which climate change presents and which he considers we are avoiding?  I suspect the last, but he doesn’t really declare himself on what is a fairly crucial point.

Much of the book explores various dimensions of our lives related to human values, human psychology, and political concerns, with a strong focus in each of them on the reasons which make for disagreement over how to respond to climate change. In these chapters Hulme draws on the social sciences and offers interesting enough surveys of the factors which may predispose us to varying responses and disagreements.

The grounds for disagreement are not hard to find.  The hope that many of us cling to is that in the face of the perils of climate change we may be able to transcend those differences and find enough comon cause to lessen the threat posed by anthropogenic global warming.

Hulme holds out little such hope.  He criticises many of the goals which many of us would look to. It’s a comprehensive list. It includes the attempt to establish a universal policy target for greenhouse gases which avoids ‘dangerous’ climate change (his quotation marks); the desire for a single carbon market with worldwide trading; the desire to rethink ideas of consumption, growth and capitalism; the desire to minimise poverty worldwide; the desire to move research and development investment in zero-carbon energy on to a ‘wartime’ footing; the desire to establish a single global policy regime as a means of global climate governance; the promotion of geo-engineering technologies.  In his opinion such goals overestimate the abilities of economics or politics or technology to tame and master our changing climate.

He also criticises the notion that climate change is the overriding project of our generation. George Monbiot is quoted in this context, not with approval: “If we fail in this task, we fail in everything else.”  On the contrary, says Hulme, we should not place ourselves in a fight against climate change as the greatest problem facing humanity, which seeks to trump all others.

So what should we do?  This is the point at which to my mind he dissolves into a kind of spiritual generality.  I have no quarrel with someone who looks for deeper levels of personal engagement with the phenomenon of climate change or seeks a wider outcome than emission reduction, which is admittedly a rather prosaic matter.  But I don’t see why that should rule out our seeking common cause in a common sense attempt to lessen a looming, and yes possibly catastrophic, danger. As  I see it Hulme is exploring a byway.

Blueprint for a global deal

The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity

It is two and a half years since the landmark Stern Report to the UK government was released. It called climate change “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen” and concluded that the benefits of strong and early action to reduce emissions far outweigh the economic costs of not acting. At 700 pages it was a daunting document.  Now Nicholas Stern has written a book which updates his thinking and explains it in terms which non-economists will readily be able to follow — The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity (US edition – confusingly published in the UK under a different title Blueprint for a Safer Planet.) Stern has a long-standing involvement with efforts to overcome poverty in developing nations.  He makes it clear from the start that combating climate change is inextricably linked with poverty reduction as the two greatest challenges of the century and that we shall succeed or fail on them together – to tackle only one is to undermine the other. This theme is frequently sounded in the book, and is an indication of the humanity which he brings to his task, as well as the realism.

Stern recognises we are on track to end-of-century temperatures of 4-5 degrees centigrade or higher relative to 1850, enough to rewrite the physical and human geography, with the prospect of massive and extended human conflict.  He firmly dismisses those who deny the dangers and the urgency of action.

The target level he focuses on for risk reduction is a maximum 500 parts per million CO2 equivalent. (CO2e includes the greenhouse gases other than CO2 and 500 ppm is roughly equivalent to the more commonly used 450 ppm CO2. The current level of CO2e is estimated at around 430 parts per million.) The target of 550 ppm CO2e adopted by the Stern Report he now considers too risky.  He notes that even at 500 ppm CO2e the risks are high – a probability of over 95% of a temperature rise greater than 2 degrees, but only a 3% chance of it being above  5 degrees. So although he uses the 500 ppm CO2e target for the purposes of the book he readily acknowledges the likely need for downward revision – probably to 400 ppm CO2e to have a fifty-fifty chance of limiting the temperature rise to 2 degrees.

A very positive section outlines the technologies already available for the task and  summarises what we must do under four headings: make more efficient use of energy;  halt deforestation; put existing or close-to-existing technologies to work quickly, including carbon capture and storage; invest strongly in new technologies which are on the medium-term horizon. The resulting low-carbon world, ushered in by a new burst of innovation, creativity and investment, will be a very attractive one in which to live. “It is a world where we can realise our ambitions for growth, development and poverty reduction across all nations, but particularly in developing countries.” This is not a fancy. Previous examples of rapid change show it can be done.  Stern’s contacts in the many places he visits and speaks leave him with a strong impression of the vast entrepeneurship and creativity which can be released given the right policy frameworks. This is one of the cheering themes of the book.

The cost is reasonable.  Drawing on McKinsey analyses to discuss cost, he concludes that  2% of GDP per annum will do it, a level smaller than some which our economies already cope with in terms of exchange-rate movements or changes in trade terms. It can be thought of in terms of an extra six months for the world economy to reach the level of world income it would otherwise reach by 2050.

There is no ‘versus’ between mitigation and adaptation. Stern descibes several ways in which different countries are taking adaptation measures and makes it very clear that adaptation is particularly important for developing countries, hit earliest and hardest by consequences for which they bear no responsibility.  He quotes Archbishop Tutu with approval: “I call on the leaders of the rich world to bring adaptation to climate change to the heart of the international poverty agenda — and to do it now, before it is too late.”

So far as Stern is concerned the ethical demand to act on climate change needs no further justification than that provided by the risks of inaction and the costs of action which he covers in the early chapters of the book.  But because many economists use a more formal and model-based discussion of how to balance the costs of inaction against the cost of action he devotes 20 pages of the book to examining how and why a number of high-profile economic analyses have got things badly wrong. The costs of inaction are much larger than are understood by many of the economists who have argued for it.  Even his own Stern Report is now shown to have been too cautious on the growth of emissions, on the deteriorating absorptive capacity of the planet, and on the pace and severity of the impacts of climate change.  The “slow ramp” approach advocated by some of his critics would lead to concentration levels so high as to be unthinkable.

Policies need to be effective, efficient and equitable. Different countries can have different combinations of policies relating to carbon taxes, carbon trading on the basis of quotas, and regulation. But the overall level of ambition needs to be strong and equitable, and there must be a strong role for trading schemes which allow international trade in greenhouse gas reduction – this trade both improves efficiency and provides incentives for developing countries to join in international action. He has an excellent section on the conditions which will enable trading schemes to work to the desired end.  The explanations of the necessity of international trading schemes as part of the mix for emission reduction were one of the highlights of the book for me, and made very clear the contribution that economists can bring to the enterprise.

We must have a global deal. The world needs an overall 50% cut in emissions by 2050 relative to 1990. Towards achieving this the developed countries need to agree to a 20% to 40% reduction in their emissions by 2020 and to 80% by 2050.  Within this time frame they need to demonstrate that low carbon growth is possible and affordable.   The developing countries need to commit, subject to the developed countries’ performance, to take on targets by 2020 at the latest. Their emissions should peak by 2030, or 2020 for the better-off among them. They should be integrated into trading mechanisms both before and after their adoption of targets.

In discussing funding he focuses on three areas. First, deforestation, responsible for 20% of global emissions.  There is a need for strong initiatives, with public funding, to move towards halting deforestation now. We should prepare to to include avoided deforestation in carbon trading.  Second, technologies must be developed and shared.  Carbon capture and storage figures strongly here and elsewhere in the book. It is highly important if only because of the significance of coal for China and India and he calls for financial commitment to help fund thirty-plus new commercial-size plants in the next seven to eight years.  His final plea is that rich countries deliver on their commitments to overseas development assistance, with extra costs of development arising from climate change.

He relates climate change policy to the current economic turbulence by pointing to two key lessons. First, that the financial crisis has been developing over 20 years and surely tells us that ignoring risk or postponing action is to store up trouble for the future. Second, to grow out of the recession we need a driver of growth which is genuinely productive and valuable.  Low-carbon growth can easily be that driver.

The book is a mine of information and helpful explanation of how proposed policy measures can work. Stern has worked closely with politicians and policy makers and obviously has familiarity with how they work and think. That doesn’t mean he has been taken over by political calculations as to what is possible or not.  Quite the contrary.  He is firm on the primary responsibility of the rich nations to steer the world through to a co-operation on climate change which will both lower emissions and at the same time bring the benefits of development to the poorer nations.  He is not afraid to sound a visionary note when he considers the good that can flow to all countries if we rise adequately to the challenge of a planet in peril. I was heartened as well as informed by his book.

Giddens on the politics of climate change

Politics of Climate Change

A couple of weeks ago I read Will Hutton’s column in the Guardian announcing that sociologist Anthony Giddens’ new book The Politics of Climate Change was an attack on the “mystic, utopian views of the green movement” and its impossible demands that we give up our current standard of living. I had Gidden’s book on order and felt dismayed at the prospect of reading the accusations Hutton expatiated on in his column. I needn’t have worried. Hutton was using the book to launch his own, not Giddens’, diatribe. Giddens does say some rather facile things about the green movement, but not to the extreme that Hutton suggested.

Giddens takes climate change seriously though he insists, in passing, on a degree of respect for the ‘sceptics’ which suggests that he isn’t fully conversant with the science. He speaks of a crisis of epic proportions, and one of his opening sentences describes his book as “a prolonged enquiry into a single question: why does anyone, anyone at all, for even a single day longer, continue to drive an SUV?”  The SUV is a metaphor – “we are all SUV drivers, because so few of us are geared up to the profundity of the threats we face.”

The scale of global warming and the fact that it is mainly about the future make it a unique problem, and paradoxically a difficult one for us to engage with, he says. We are dealing with dangers that seem abstract and elusive, however potentially devastating. What should be a front-of-mind issue becomes a back-of-mind one.

Giddens develops a number of concepts in the course of the book. Two of prominence are political and economic convergence. Political convergence occurs when policies relevant to mitigating climate change overlap positively with other areas of public policy and each can be used to gain traction over the other. Areas such as energy security and energy planning, technological innovation, lifestyle politics, the downside of affluence and the need for a sense of human welfare greater than mere GDP. This oblique approach avoids what he sees as the inadequacy of focusing on global warming alone, in view of the perceived inability of people to act on dangers which aren’t immediate or visible.

Economic convergence refers to situations where low-carbon technologies and lifestyles may overlap with economic competitiveness. In other words environmentally progressive policies may well coincide with what is good for the economy, and attention should be focused on this.  He somewhat qualifies this with the recognition that growth should not be treated as an unalloyed benefit, especially in the developed countries.

Political transcendence, another of his concepts, means the question of climate change has to move beyond party divides and have an overall framework of agreement that will endure across changes of government.  Giddens notes that he has never agreed that the political centre is the antithesis of radicalism. Sometimes overall political agreement is the condition of radical policy-making, definitely so in the case of climate change.

In considering the track record of countries to date he does some thumbnail sketches of a few who have been the most successful in controlling carbon emissions – Sweden foremost, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Cost Rica, Denmark.  He includes New Zealand largely on the grounds of our ambitions which he thinks look unlikely to be realised.  It’s not clear whether he’s caught up on the fact that NZ’s present government has disavowed any wish to show leadership in the matter. The case of the UK is examined in detail, some of which I’ll traverse here as an example of the kind of detailed useful information the book incorporates. The ambition of the 2008 Climate Change Act is recognised. It set a statutory target of an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 over a 1990 baseline. A progress report will be published every five years and reviewed by Parliament, along with the ongoing results of an adaptation programme. A carbon budget will be established to cover each five-year period.  A Committee on Climate Change will advise the government on the level of carbon budgets and the optimal path towards emission reduction targets.  The Energy Act of the same year recognised how closely climate change and energy change policy are intertwined. Giddens acknowledges the determination shown by these two pieces of legislation and notes the high degree of cross-party support in their passage through parliament. Although some sceptics used the opportunity to air their views the main clauses were strengthened rather than weakened.  He goes on to discuss weaknesses and problems which remain, the following among them: the policies are more about ‘what to do’ than ‘how to do’; both Acts are organized mainly in terms of negatives and lack a positive vision; the Climate Change Committee is only advisory; the objectives of the Climate Change Act are not necessarily reconciled with other government policy – eg. Heathrow.  The chapter concludes with the recognition that progress is relatively limited even among the best performing nations. There is a long way yet to go.

Giddens goes on to consider the role of the state in ensuring that a serious impact is made on global warming. While he agrees that international agreements will be essential and that many other agencies, including NGOs and businesses, will play a fundamental role, it is the state which retains many of the powers that will need to be invoked. A few examples follow.

The state must help us to think ahead. Political leaders must introduce policies for the long term. This means a return to planning, in some guise or another. Targets may make government ministers feel good, but it is means which must be concentrated on in planning. Governments should also encourage other sectors of society and individuals to shift towards long-term thinking.

The state must intervene in markets to institutionalise ‘the polluter pays’ principle, thereby ensuring that markets work in favour of climate change policy rather than against it. So-called externalities must be brought into the marketplace.  Environmental costs must not be permitted to remain outside the economic system.

The state must counter business interests which seek to block climate change initiatives. A tall order given the dominance of big business, Giddens agrees, but large-scale change must be achieved.  He believes governments acting together with enlightened corporate leaders could find a confluence of interests – an example of economic convergence.

The state must keep climate change at the top of the political agenda. Competing political parties must agree that climate change and energy policy will be sustained in spite of other differences and conflicts. Climate change should feature in the curriculum of all schools.

The state must provide subsidies to enable new technologies to thrive, since, in the beginning, they will be unable to compete with fossil fuels.  Giddens discusses in some detail the function carbon taxes can play in stimulating innovation. He inclines towards carbon taxes over carbon emissions markets, though sees no reason why the two can’t co-exist.

Later in the book Giddens examines the function of international agreements. He expresses reservations about the effectiveness of the Kyoto-style approach in terms of the danger that an elaborate architecture may be created but no buildings actually get constructed. The national and local level are the places where binding targets are most likely to work.  He does not suggest we turn our backs on international cooperation, but thinks there is a role for agreements or partnerships between individual nations, groups of countries and regions which could act to strengthen more universal measures. The US and China surely need to get together, since where climate change and energy security are concerned they hold the future of the world in their hands.  If the EU is treated as a single entity then just six countries have produced 70 percent of cumulative world emissions, twenty have been responsible for 88 percent. These groups should be meeting to contribute to collective efforts.

If Giddens stands with the optimists, it is not in the sense that the risks we face have been exaggerated. Doomsday is a possibility imminent in our society and economy. He is optimistic in the sense that he sees risk and opportunity belonging together and considers it possible that we can mobilise to meet the opportunities through appropriate new technologies.

The book occasionally irritated me in its attitude to the green groups which have for some time sounded the alarm on climate change and spoken of the need for changes in society’s direction. I could sometimes detect a tone of “move over naïve ones, the sophisticates will take up the reins now”. I also wonder at the assertion of these sophisticates that the public can’t usefully be confronted head on with the realities of climate change. I was, when I started to read in the area, and it has galvanised me far more than any oblique approach would have done. I am inclined to think that the problem with public opinion and the politicians who fail to guide it is not simply that they are unwilling to face the facts, but also that they have not yet received a clear picture of climate change and the measures needed to abate it. The organised denialist movement bears a heavy responsibility here.

However I am no sociologist, and Giddens does not in any case exclude the more direct approach. Nor does he evade the need for policy measures to be fully adequate to the challenge. I thought his book a useful, often engaging discussion of the political options and an informative account of what is under way in many parts of the world.