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."
A fisherman rows past the setting sun in Disko Bay, Greenland. Scientists say that global warming has an increasing effect on the Arctic region. (John McConnico/AP)
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.
