News

The Weather Makers: How We are Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
By Tim Flannery
HarperCollins, 357 pages, $34.95

Let's face it: Homo economicus is one hell of an overachiever. He has invaded more than three quarters of the globe's surface and monopolized nearly half of all plant life to help make dinner. He has netted most of the ocean's fish and will soon eat his way through the world's last great apes. For good measure, he has fouled most of the world's rivers. And his gluttonous appetites have started a wave of extinctions that could trigger the demise of 25 per cent of the world's creatures within 50 years. The more godlike he becomes, the less godly Homo economicus behaves.

But Homo economicus is now busy crossing another threshold. According to Tim Flannery, a feisty Australian paleontologist and one of the world's great science writers, economic man has entered the weather-making business, too. Thanks to clouds of carbon pollution from the world's great 200-year-old fossil-fuel fiesta, we won't have to worry any more about Acts of God by 2050, Flannery says. "Everything will be an Act of Man."

Although the subject of climate change rarely rains on Canadian politics, Flannery's highly critical analysis of the globe's wacky carbon dictatorship might help change all that. This authoritative and maddeningly important book will fuel dinner arguments, spark school debates and rudely challenge the self-satisfied truffle-eaters and climate deniers among Calgary's oil elite. In Australia, its publication created such a stir that Environment Minister Ian Campbell did an about-face and declared that climate change "represented a serious threat to Australia."

Given the erupting carbon volcano in the oil sands, Flannery's frightening guide to thermostat fiddling and fixing should strike a nerve or two in dithering Canada. His basic warning is blunt, simple and accurate: "If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century ..... the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable."

The good news is that Flannery thinks we can still prevent much chaos with modest behavioural changes that won't send Homo economicus to bankruptcy court. So think of The Weather Makers as a unique cost-benefit analysis on our fossil-fuel addiction, or a fine bit of forensic reporting on our industrial carbon emissions.

Flannery begins his rousing account the same way CSI's Gil Grissom begins a case — with "what cannot lie ..... the evidence." Like most folks, the prominent museum director (some detractors call him a "media tart") mostly ignored the confusing hoopla on climate change in the 1990s. But by 2001, he realized that the rapid advance of trees in his favourite mountain haunts squared with all the scientific predictions. When researchers reported that glaciers were disappearing 10 times faster than previously thought in 2004, Flannery, a father, got worried. He decided to wade through thousands of studies and media clichés, and all the calculated confusion emitted by some oil and gas lobby groups.

Flannery found a hell of a story. The atmosphere — the "Great Aerial Ocean," the great Alfred Russel Wallace called it — has regulated the Earth's temperature for nearly four billion years. Whenever carbon dioxide levels have fallen, the planet has frozen, and whenever they have climbed, the place has warmed up. On Venus, where CO2 rules, the surface temperature is great for welding (477 Celsius), but not much else.

Homo sapiens took advantage of an unusual warm spell 10,000 years ago to create civilizations and invent farming. Folks got thoroughly addicted to hydrocarbons because they were portable and fun, and they have now boosted carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million to 380 ppm since the Industrial Revolution. Some estimates suggest we might go, Venus-like, as high as 710 ppm, with a nearly eight-degree change in temperature in temperate regions alone.

Many greenhouse gases such as CO2 can stay aloft for 100 years, which means 70 per cent of the people reading this will live to feel and see the heat-trapping consequences of their behaviour in 2050. The planet hasn't seen this kind of carbon growth and warm-up in nearly 400,000 years. Now we face the world's worst headache, Flannery says: "Earth's average temperature is around 15 C and whether we allow it to rise by a single degree or 3 C will decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of species and most probably billions of people."

This man-made carbon explosion is now jerkily changing the climate about 30 times faster than the last Ice Age did. The speed and scale of change, however, hasn't given most species much time to adapt. But thousands of creatures of all kinds, from butterflies to fish, are moving toward the poles to escape the rising heat. Some birds are laying eggs 24 days earlier, and many plants are pulling up roots and changing their range. Slow movers like frogs, glaciers, trees and most nature reserves are dying, or melting, or will be just left behind. The evidence is so decisive "that it's as if the researchers had caught CO2 in the act of driving nature pole-wards with a lash."

Meanwhile, things are really becoming balmy at the poles. Antarctica is now turning green, and the ice that used to sustain fantastic populations of krill is dwindling. Without krill dinners, penguins will march no more (the emperor penguin population has declined by half), and seals and whales are already starving. In the Arctic, it now rains instead of snows in the fall, and caribou can't scrape the ice off lichen. The great white bear, one of our national symbols and another mammal dependent on ice, is already making reservations at the global wildlife morgue. "If nothing is done to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it seems certain that some time this century, a day will dawn when no summer ice will be seen in the Arctic." Stephen Harper might have to cancel that order for icebreakers after all.

The oceans, too, are sending out wave after wave of disturbing signals. Between 1800 and 1994, they absorbed nearly half of the carbon made by humans. In fact, the oceans have sucked up so much carbon that they are turning acidic and can't handle any more of the gas. They are also warming at such alarming levels that they are creating hurricanes that can effortlessly drown oil rigs and petrochemical works. Melting glaciers are bringing up sea levels so quickly that islands in the South Pacific are negotiating migration rights to New Zealand.

Next comes the subject of rainfall. The standard climate-change model calls for more rain, but not necessarily when or where we need it, or in sensible amounts. As a result, a rainfall deficit has turned Africa's Sahel region into an ever-drying dust storm and stirred up bloody politics in the Sudan. Western Australia used to enjoy reliable showers, but no more. Perth has lost 50 per cent of its ground water, and Sydney's four million people have only two years of supply in storage. Ever-dwindling snow packs and water volume along the Rockies could bring down the house in Las Vegas.

Climate change also has some laughing jokers in its deck. They include the desiccation of the Amazon rain forest and the release of ocean methane deposits which would accelerate the rate of cooking manyfold. A collapse or slowing of the Gulf Stream due to the release of cold Arctic glacier water could also turn life in Europe upside down. The fossil record shows that "things don't always go smoothly on planet Earth."

The oil industry, a business highly dependent on modelling, has done its best to portray many climate-change computer models as error-ridden. But Flannery sets the record straight here, too. Yes, there were some problems, but they were largely due to poor satellite data. The best and most sophisticated computer modelling, such as that performed at England's Hadley Centre, can actually simulate real-world weather. NASA scientists can even predict the impact of a volcanic eruption as large as Mt. Pinatubo. But no modelers foretold that the total amount of energy released by hurricanes worldwide would increase by 60 per cent in two decades. And no modelers predicted that the U.S. government would persistently censor the science on climate change.

The Alberta cliché that it's too hard to start controlling carbon emissions is a Big Lie, Flannery says. Researchers at Princeton University, for example, recently showed that 15 existing technologies, from wind to nuclear power, could reduce carbon emissions dramatically without snuffing the economy. Like James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, Flannery considers a modest expansion of nuclear energy inevitable, despite the obvious safety risks. He doesn't think much of hydrogen (a carbon disaster), but considers geothermal energy a much-neglected treasure. In southern Australia, for instance, one rock body contains enough heat to supply Australia's needs for 75 years, and at the same cost as cheap coal.

Industrial arguments about the cost of cutting back don't hold water any better than New Orleans, Flannery adds. British communities that have reduced greenhouse emissions by 70 per cent are still thriving because they've reduced their dependency on ever-rising oil costs.

Brilliant research by U.S. economist Eban Goodstein shows that the doomsday cost scenarios laid out by oil-funded lobbyists are just pure smog. When Goodstein compared the real cost of pollution controls for asbestos and other lung chokers with industry's apocalyptic scenarios, he found that the regulations were always doable or downright profitable. Pollution regulation can spur great innovations. So too can carbon taxes and higher energy royalties.

Flannery strongly believes that that if ordinary folks and governments all do their bit to reduce carbon pollution, we can prevent a Second World War-type struggle with our climate. But an increasing number of scientists strongly disagree with Flannery. U.S. environmental scientist William Ruddiman thinks only "draconian economic sacrifices" will do the trick. James Lovelock argues that the Earth has already caught a "morbid fever," and that "we are in a fool's climate and before this century is over billions of us will die." Many ecologists reckon that the pathological marriage of population growth and oil consumption is headed for a murderous divorce. A few even suggest that we will run out of finite fossil fuels before climate hell mops up the survivors.

Though many of his proposals are on the soft side (buy a solar heater here, a smart car there), Flannery clearly identifies the need for sustained carbon reductions. If the Montreal Protocol can repair holes in the ozone without nuking the economy, than surely we can systemically tackle carbon pollution. Kyoto may not be the world's brightest deal, Flannery adds, but it puts us on the right road.

Whether Canada's new prime minister recognizes it or not, the politics of energy, carbon and climate change will ultimately define his minority government. Canada can either follow the George Bush model and create a world of uncertainly and chaos for capitalism, or it can take a hopeful path of innovation and restraint. If Stephen Harper, who clearly loves his children, is looking for a reasoned and concise guide on weather making, he can't do better than Tim Flannery's book.

Contributing reviewer Andrew Nikiforuk is a Calgary-based writer. His book Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cows and Other Pandemics of the 21st Century, will be published this spring.