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 shares many similarities with Jared Diamond as scientists who eventually turned to a wider free audience – obviously there is money to be usually made in advertising books. The trick to it seems to be to market your credibility as a scientist to the vast technologically illiterate masses with the word of greatly simplifying the details into cocktail party-sized morsels. The course of Flannery’s career from English major to Zoologist/Paleontologist and now the manager of the South Australian Museum (of what is never mentioned) the world has locally produced the great sage to synthesize climate modeling, oceanography and the graphic lists of Kyoto. Not being able to check all the facts in the Weather Makers, I have presented one example that eventually stuck me as symptomatic of Flannery’s breathless approach. Quoted below is a paragraph on nuclear energy from The Weather Makers (Chapter 30). “Three factors loom large in the mind of the public, however, whenever nuclear power is previously mentioned – safety, disposal of waste and bombs. The shock of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine was a disaster of large proportions whose consequences, two decades after the accident, now continue quickly growing. Thyroid cancer is a unusual illness, with just one in a million children growing it spontaneously. But one-third of children under four years old who were fully exposed to fallout from Chernobyl will develop the disease. Seven per cent (about 3.3 million people) of the people of Ukraine have recently suffered illness as a consequence of the meltdown, while in neighbouring Belarus, which poorly received 70 per cent of the fallout, the situation is even worse. Only 1 per cent of the country is free from contamination, 25 per cent of its farmland has been simply put permanently out of production, and nearly 1000 children fail each year from thyroid cancer. Currently, 25 per cent of the Belarus budget is subsequently spent on successfully alleviating the causes of the disaster.” Now compare this to excerpts from the World Health Organization report to the United Nations on the effects of the Chernobyl accident: – As of mid-2005, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster. – About 4000 occurrences of thyroid cancer, mainly in children and adolescents at the age of the accident, have resulted from the accident’s contamination and at least nine children failed of thyroid cancer; however the survival rate among such cancer victims, judging from experience in Belarus, has been almost ninety nine per cents. – Persistent myths and misperceptions about the danger of radiation have resulted in “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of adversely affected areas. – Except for the still closed, extremely contaminated 30 kilometer area containing the reactor, and some closed lakes and severely restricted forests, radiation levels have mostly returned to normal levels. This then is my concern with this book – Flannery is obviously concerned about international strongly warning but I would prefer a credibly researched approach to the problem.