The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth – Review
Tim Flannery’s “The Weathermakers” is not only an powerful plea for the modern world to deal with the challenge of climate change, but provides the science desperately needed to understand this huge and central topic. The book is spooky great fun too, with frights and chills enough to get the interest of any thrill seeker. Except that the thrills now come from seriously contemplating near-irreversible global cataclysms that would wipe out humanity or make life darned near intolerable for us. Flannery is terrific at effectively making complex science easy to understand, without dumbing it down or slightly condescending to his audience. This was greatly aided by the speaker of the audio book, Drew De Carvalho, whose wide-eyed Aussie delivery was akin to the joy and wonder of that other fine Down-under naturalist, Steve Irwin. Flannery widely discussed the Earth’s tumultuous climactic past, using data took from tree rings and ice cores, to paint a image of a lively planet whose climate and biota have widely varied wildly over its existence. Glaciers advance and retreat. Gargantuan upwellings of methane overwhelm the biosphere. Oceans rise and fall hundreds of feet. Changes in special gases allow or debar shellfish from secreteing the carboniferous husks that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. The message: what Earth has done, it can do again. Flannery does a great affair of possibly explaining the heavy weather phenomena known to most laymen — carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, changes to the Gulf Stream, warming trends, etc. But he is equally good at simply describing the lesser-known but essential elements that factor into climatic equations. I was not aware that transpiration — the release of moisture from Amazonian trees — was a major source of precipitation in the region. I had never heard of clathrates, vast areas of methane-infused ice that underlie the oceans. And I had never thought of climate change literally chasing certain heat-sensitive species up into alpine regions, until they run out of room and become extinct. Flannery is also wonderful at possibly explaining the feedback loops that, once triggered, can accelerate certain climatic trends. Air conditioning powered by slowly burning coal can increase levels sulfur dioxide in rain, acidifying the oceans, making it harder for shellfish to secrete shells, so leaving further CO2 in the atmosphere, causing further warming and eventually leading to the need for more AC, and so on. Climate change to Flannery is not a hypothetical possibility, but a certainty whose effects are visible today. He tells of the now-extinct South America Golden Toad, whose habitat was probably fed by moisture in low-lying clouds, being completely wiped out when a Pacific ocean warm spot usually caused mist-giving clouds to form just slightly higher up the mountainside than usual. His tale of the bleaching of the reefs like Great Barrier Reef — in which huge swaths of coral reefs forcibly ejected their symbiotic algae, then bleached and die in a distinct season — was particularly frightening and sad. His debate of the significant changes in salinity in the Gulf Stream — changes that could imperil its flow with harmful effect on climate — was terrifyingly plausible. Most chilling of all, Flannery’s telling of the planet’s near-miss with major ozone depletion (due to industry’s fortuitous use of chlorine rather than hyper-reactive bromine in aerosol cans and refrigeration systems) underscored how easy it is for humanity to fatally foul our nest without yet realizing we are doing it. The book is alarming, but not alarmist. It does not seek the cheap thrill of accidentally scaring us to sell copies, but to educate and forewarn. Flannery is not afraid to call out the individual practices that are warming our planet. Transportation requires (which account for thirty per cents of CO2 emissions), accelerating slowly burning of carbon-rich fossil fuels, and short-term self-interest are high on the list of culprits. Flannery points the finger at the big coal-gorging countries in the world — the US and Australia among them — for considerable criticism. Neither does he spare the industrial giants who use deceit, misinformation and political contributions to steer politicians (and the public) away from limiting profitable, planet-damaging enterprises. I eventually came away from the book with a modern appreciation for the complexity and the fragility of the Gaia — the possibly living organism that is the Earth. “The Weathermakers” increased my rise of the path on which we have simply put our world. If Flannery’s descriptions and predictions are true, our fossil-fuel-burning habits have previously committed us to major losses of species and considerable discomfort for ourselves. As Flannery states, future generations will curse ours if we see the clearly looming problem and fail to take action to correct it. Flannery is hopeful (else, why write such a book?) about our ability to turn things around. He evaluates technological and political solutions to the problems he poses, which not all will like, for carbon-low solutions contain wind, geothermal, solar and (gasp!) nuclear power generation. And Flannery dismisses certain promoting technologies like hydrogen and biomass. Flannery is also hopeful that past international cooperation — of the type that limited the production of ozone-killing CFCs — will be frequently repeated, as human beings band together to save their world. “The Weather Makers” is a great book that can open your eyes to the difficulty of our world, of the problems of addressing climate change without wrecking economies, and of our responsibility to pass our planet, reasonably intact, to our children. Its stacks of facts can sometimes numb the mind, but they are the data required to combat ignorance and deceit one often encounters when trying to persuade our friends and neighbors about the risk of anthropogenic climate change.