"[Sweet's] lively, clear reporting of both the science and politics of climate change, and his interweaving of simple explanations with vignettes about many of the places and personalities involved, make the book a pleasure to read."
Jolting Messages on Climate Change
By DOUG MACDOUGALL
The scientific evidence that the earth is getting warmer, and that human activity is at least partly responsible, is overwhelming. Almost no climatologists now dispute the idea that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are heating up our planet.
Some politicians remain unconvinced, however, including Sen. James M. Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." And although President Bush has admitted on several occasions that climate change is an issue that must be dealt with, according to some prominent scientists, his administration suppresses scientific evidence for global warming. But public opinion may be ahead of the politicians: A February poll by The New York Times and CBS News, for instance, showed that 59 percent of the respondents would support an increase in the federal tax on gasoline if it would help reduce global warming. Only 34 percent said they would oppose raising the tax.
In the media, it is hard to avoid news about climate change, global warming, and CO2 emissions. Connections, however tenuous, are made between global climate change and almost every anomalous weather event - from Hurricane Katrina to record high temperatures in January in Central Park. However, although extreme weather is a possible outcome of higher average temperatures, scientists are quick to point out that individual storms or record temperatures can never be tied unequivocally to global warming. Indeed, predicting what precisely its effects will be is really the only current area of debate and disagreement.
Nevertheless, the preponderance of scientific opinion is that the consequences of global warming are likely to be severe. That notion, and the need for immediate remedial action, is the inspiration for five new books on the topic. They offer a feast of information about global warming, describing the underlying science, the already apparent effects on individual communities and ecosystems, and the actions that can be taken to mitigate the damage we are causing to the atmosphere.
Four of the books are by journalists, a sign of the widespread interest in climate change. All are clearly written and easy to understand. They should be required reading for policy makers across the globe.
Let's start with Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers. Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum, in Adelaide, is the only scientist among the five authors discussed here. His background, though, is not in climate science. He says that he resisted taking time away from his research as a mammalogist to worry about climate until 2001, when the growing volume of scientific evidence convinced him that ecosystems everywhere are under threat from climate change; then he plunged into the subject.
"Climate change is difficult for people to evaluate dispassionately ... because it arises from the core processes of our civilization's success," says Flannery. The result is that "winners and losers will be created" as we tackle the problem.
Flannery is a gifted and persuasive writer. He weaves together his own field experiences with what he has learned from the literature. He is particularly adept at describing the effects of climate warming on biodiversity around the world. His description of the greening of the Antarctic - there are now meadows of Antarctic hair grass, which previously grew only in isolated tufts - presents a particularly striking image.
Or consider the Peary caribou of west Greenland and Canada's Arctic islands. You might think that warmer weather would be a boon in the harsh life of that mammal. But rain rather than snow in the autumn creates an icy layer over the lichens that are the primary winter food of the caribou. They can paw through snow, but the layer of ice is impenetrable, and the caribou starve. They are, suddenly, an endangered species.
Like all the authors mentioned here, Flannery has little use for the response of the Bush administration and the energy industry to the challenge of greenhouse-gas emissions. "It is almost impossible to overestimate," he writes, "the role [the fossil-fuel companies] have played over the past two decades in preventing the world from taking serious action to combat climate change." He cites examples such as the changes in government reports made by Philip A. Cooney, a Bush aide and oil-industry lobbyist, to minimize the likely impact of climate change.
Yet Flannery is an optimist. He believes we already have the means to drastically curtail emissions and stabilize atmospheric CO2 before irreversible damage is done. Some combination of wind, solar, nuclear, and possibly geothermal power could, he claims, greatly reduce dependence of the electrical grid on coal-fired power plants, the most egregious emitters of CO2.
Whether we have the will to do so is another matter. Flannery argues that grass-roots action - lobbying, conservation, and using green alternatives such as hybrid cars - is the most effective way to force politicians and the energy industry to focus on reducing CO2 emissions.
Although several greenhouse gases trap the sun's energy near the earth's surface, CO2 is the one most in the news because it is directly produced from burning fossil fuels. Its heat-trapping properties have been known since the mid-19th century, although it wasn't until 1965 that Roger Revelle, then director of the Center for Population Studies at Harvard University, led a government panel that issued the first official warning about the potential dangers to the climate.
Fast-forward to the present, and the signs of global warming are everywhere. Arctic permafrost that has been frozen for tens of thousands of years is melting. Spring flowers bloom weeks earlier in England than they did a century ago, and the ranges of many plant and animal species are shifting as higher latitudes and altitudes become warmer. Coral reefs are dying because of increased seawater temperatures, the sea level is rising because ocean water expands as it warms, and the glaciers of Greenland are melting faster than ever before.
Many of those phenomena, and others related to global warming, are described in Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe, a book that grew out of a series she wrote for The New Yorker. Kolbert builds her story around individual incidents, including a project to build floating houses in Holland in anticipation of higher sea levels, the relocation of an entire Inuit village in Alaska that is threatened by climate change, and community efforts at energy conservation in Burlington, Vt.
Kolbert deliberately keeps her treatment of the science behind global warming to a minimum, which is a pity because it is important for the public to know more about how scientists are tackling this complex topic. However, her research is thorough. She gleaned much of her information from personal interviews and visits to localities around the world.
Although she is clearly distressed by the lack of concern of the Bush administration about global warming and climate change, Kolbert tends not to use alarmist language to argue for a particular viewpoint, choosing instead to let her stories and interviews do the talking. That is an effective approach to a topic that could, in less-skilled hands, make for dull reading. And by the end of the book, the reader will have no doubt that the problem is a serious one.
Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change takes a different tack. Linden has obviously done an immense amount of research, and he has arranged his book to resemble a court case, complete with opening arguments, evidence, cross-examination, and closing arguments. The question to be decided is whether climate change has been "a serial killer of colonies and even civilizations." Based on Linden's close analysis of existing expert opinion, the answer is yes.
On his way to that conclusion, Linden shows that abrupt climate change - now well documented by variations within cores of ice from Greenland - was probably of primary importance in the collapse of the Akkadian empire in the Middle East and the Mayan empire of Central America. In both cases, societies dependent on agriculture were plunged into severe famine by sudden and long-lasting drought (several of the other books discussed here also describe those now well-documented examples). Furthermore, he argues that climate change through history has probably had many other victims, including 14th-century Norse settlers in Greenland who perished when increasing cold made impossible even the subsistence farming they had established during a warm period, and millions of Chinese and Indian peasants who died in droughts caused by El Niño in 1877-78.
Linden deals easily with the basic science behind climate change, making understandable even such seemingly obscure concepts as geochemical proxies, the characteristics of cores of ice or ocean sediment that can be used to infer properties such as past temperatures. But after following the science of climate change for decades, Linden is worried about whether information is getting through to the public. "It's hard to imagine another issue with such important bearing on our future in which there is a larger disconnect between scientific and public perceptions," he writes.
John D. Cox is also concerned about public complacency in the face of a flood of alarming scientific evidence. In Climate Crash, he focuses on an aspect of climate change that was not known until recently: the fact that the earth's climate has previously undergone large and abrupt changes with little or no warning.
Cox captures the excitement of the scientists who uncovered the evidence for abrupt climate change by collecting ice cores in Greenland in the 1990s. Prevailing opinion was that smooth, gradual temperature changes occurred as the earth moved in and out of ice ages. Instead, the ice cores revealed rapid flip-flops between warmer and cooler periods during those transitions. No special instruments were needed; over just inches of a core, radical changes were visible. The ice changed from clear to opaque, and the thickness of annual layers decreased by half. Both are signatures of drastic temperature shifts.
Laboratory analyses of the ice cores show that the changes seen by researchers mark local temperature shifts that sometimes were more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit, occurred within a decade, and lasted a thousand years before reversing. Evidence from other parts of the earth indicates that those changes were global and often affected regional precipitation patterns.
Exactly what triggered the abrupt climate changes is unknown, but the ice cores show that they were most frequent when the earth's average temperature was rising or falling due to natural causes. As we add more CO2 to the atmosphere, the concern is that human-induced warming will similarly trigger abrupt climate change. Adaptation to large regional shifts in temperature, precipitation, and storminess will be all the more difficult because of the rapidity of the change. The potential for serious consequences - for example, for agriculture and for coastal populations vulnerable to tropical storms - suggests that the prudent course is to limit warming by stemming greenhouse-gas emissions.
That brings us to Kicking the Carbon Habit, by William Sweet. This is the most analytical and technically detailed of the five new books, and the most comprehensive in suggesting solutions. Sweet argues convincingly that global warming "represents a kind of international emergency, requiring immediate concerted action." His lively, clear reporting of both the science and politics of climate change, and his interweaving of simple explanations with vignettes about many of the places and personalities involved, make the book a pleasure to read.
Sweet takes aim especially at coal, which releases much more CO2 when burned than do either gasoline or natural gas. He advocates increased use of renewable energy sources that do not emit CO2, like wind and, to a lesser extent, solar power. But unlike many people concerned about the environment, he argues that nuclear energy (which generates no greenhouse gases) should play a role in meeting growing energy demands.
Sweet is impressed by the force of the scientific evidence for human-induced global warming. "So strong is the consensus," he writes, that "journalists have begun to wonder whether their normal instinct to tell both sides of a story has actually led them to produce unbalanced work - giving skeptics about global warming much more leeway than they deserve."
But with his insight into the workings of the energy industry - he is an editor at IEEE Spectrum, an electrical-engineering journal - he believes the technology exists to reduce carbon emissions in time to avoid catastrophe. The solution he recommends is to cut radically the consumption of both coal and gasoline; go "all out" for renewable energy, conservation, and green design, such as energy-efficient buildings; and make nuclear energy part of the solution.
What struck me about the five books was the authors' strong convictions that we are truly at a tipping point, and that immediate, concerted action is necessary before it is too late. Even if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could somehow be kept at today's levels, the earth would continue to heat up for a few decades because of inertia in the climate system. Only by greatly curtailing emissions, these books argue, can we avoid changes in temperature, precipitation, and day-to-day weather large enough to disrupt modern society through their impact on agriculture, water resources, and the spread of disease.
If this message jolts politicians and the public into effective action, these authors will have done us all a great service.
Doug Macdougall is an emeritus professor of earth sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego. His most recent book is Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages (University of California Press, 2004).
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Climate Crash: Abrupt Climate Change and What It Means for Our Future,
by John D. Cox
(Joseph Henry Press, 2005)
Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change,
by Elizabeth Kolbert
(Bloomsbury, 2006)
Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy,
by William Sweet
(Columbia University Press, 2006)
The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change,
by Tim Flannery
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)
The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations,
by Eugene Linden
(Simon and Schuster, 2006)
