The New York Times, March 10, 2006
It would be hard to imagine a better time for these two important books to appear. The science of global warming has been making dramatic headlines.
NASA scientists recently reported that 2005 was the hottest year on record. Researchers studying the oldest core of Greenland ice yet extracted have also reported that there is more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any other point in the past 650,000 years. The vast majority of climate scientists agree that if we continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the world’s temperature will climb significantly, and new computer models project a grim scenario of droughts and rising sea levels.
Global warming is a fiendishly complex scientific puzzle, and “The Weather Makers” and “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” help show how the individual pieces fit together into a worrying whole.
It is also a fiendishly complex political puzzle, and there may not be much time to decide how to act. Some leading climate scientists warn that we might be as few as 20 years away from a “tipping point,” after which it will be too late to reverse catastrophic change. Yet so far such warnings have not led to much meaningful action.
The Bush administration proposes cutting carbon emissions by investing in hybrid cars and other futuristic technologies. Meanwhile, many of the nations that signed the Kyoto Protocols are failing to meet their own targets.
Tim Flannery, a distinguished Australian scientist, and Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker, hope to seize this moment and make the world take global warming seriously.
“If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable,” Flannery warns. His book may be having an impact already: last October, Australia’s environment minister cited “The Weather Makers” when he told a reporter unequivocally that the debate over global warming was over and industrialized nations needed to take urgent action. Still, it’s hard to know whether these two passionate, well-researched books will have an enduring effect or will just join a long list of earlier titles on global warming that have not slowed the greenhouse express. And both books have flaws that may blunt their effectiveness.
Flannery, who has written several previous books for a popular audience, takes a long view, offering an account of the history of earth’s shifting climate. Climate change, he makes clear, is itself nothing new, and organisms have long played a role in it. Ever since earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, heat-trapping gases have kept the atmosphere warm. The planet has simmered and cooled, its changing temperature influenced in part by fluctuating levels of greenhouse gases. Life itself has helped control global warming, both by absorbing greenhouse gases and then by releasing them at death. Sometimes this release has been catastrophic. About 55 million years ago, Flannery writes, a surge of carbon dioxide and methane (another greenhouse gas) flooded the atmosphere, raising the average surface temperature of the earth by 9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 12 to minus 7 Celsius) and causing mass extinctions in what he calls a “vast, natural gas-driven equivalent of a barbecue.” Scientists suggest that much of the gas had been stored at the bottom of the sea floor by methane-producing bacteria.
Over the past 50 million years, the planet has been gradually cooling as those greenhouse gases dwindled. Antarctica, once covered by forests and roamed by dinosaurs, grew an ice cap. The earth fell into a cycle of ice ages, in which glaciers expanded and then retreated over tens of thousands of years. The trigger for this cycle was probably earth’s wobbly orbit, which changes the amount of sunlight reaching the poles. But greenhouse gases seem to have helped drive the cycle. At the beginning of each ice age, levels of carbon dioxide and methane plunge, and at the end they surge back.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with permission.