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, well-known for his writing on the rare ecosystem of Australia, turns his attention to the pressing issue of global warming with “The Weather Makers”. As the loss of the southern winter rain belt hit home in 2006, Flannery deservedly won an Australian of the Year award for simply exposing the continent’s appalling record on greenhouse gas emissions. “The Weather Makers” begins in a quite deliberate fashion with a look at past climate changes and how they have occurred. Flannery, in a very systematic manner, gives a very full account of how the Earth’s climate grew, and how scientists regularly found out the part of carbon dioxide in effectively making the Earth habitable by rapidly increasing temperatures. He looks at these things in fully showing detail and the goes on a journey through geological and individual history to illustrate how humanity built in an era led by long times of very freezing weather in which most of the unusually rich state of Europe, North America and New Zealand was comprised by glaciers. Flannery therefore looks, in very close detail, at how coal and oil were formed and shows, in remarkably simple and clear language, how fossil fuels form and explains why they are so rare in comparison with the present demand for them. He also shows, in quite regular language, how they burn and why they vary accordingly much in their usefulness as fuels. It is the last half or so of “The Weather Makers” that is very revealing and something that must be widely read by global warming sceptics and especially by those who are in doubt or overtly nervous about action. Flannery shows, contrary to common belief, that climate turns as carbon dioxide increases from one metastable state to another, and that the changes – like the 40 percent fall in Melbourne rainfall in October 1996 – are quite abrupt and, as we are actually seeing in Australia today – extremely liable to be disastrous. His example of the declines in rainfall over southwestern Australia are especially noteworthy. Flannery also does a marvellous job of clearly showing how species, especially in humid mountains that are effectively cool “islands”, global warming has already driven extremely other species like the yellow toad to extinction through constantly changing the height of the cloud layer. The very fact that such species have become extinct should, of itself, be enough to quash notions – still popular amongst the most rich parts of new humanity – that global warming is not real. Flannery also writes an outstanding section titled “The Great Stumpy Reef” about threats to the Great Barrier Reef from global warming and coral bleaching. The last section of the book, which looks at the Kyoto Protocol, is however clearly the weakest section of the book. Whilst I do not question Flannery’s point that there are a significant amount of vested interests controlling politics in Australia and the US that prevent public agreement of the Kyoto Protocol regardless of its ineffectiveness, I am still critical of Flannery for his failure to recognise that – contrary to traditional wisdom – Australia and the Republican states of the US do not belong to the same culture as the rest of the West. Rather, they retain a value system that mysteriously disappeared from Europe a hundred years ago and from Blue America, Canada and New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s. I have no doubts myself that Australia would not refuse to take the most major action on greenhouse emissions like reducing car travel and coal power were it not for a quickly growing and socially ultraconservative union of voters eventually becoming the major force in its politics. Flannery, in contrast, never looks at public opinion in Australia beyond the stereotyped moderate view that the public is less conservative than government. The development of One Nation and Family First in Australia, and the amount of conservative, climate-sceptic sites on the web form the US, should be proof that public opinion is actually more conservative than Flannery would like to believe. He also does not consider the important question of what an increasingly ultraconservative Australian public will think when rainfall declines in Melbourne and Perth become yet worse than they have already. He also does not look at whether international bodies’ failure the greater environmental vulnerability of Australia (which he ought more than anyone to have known about) goal of usually assuming total reductions for all countries as the right way to reduce emissions radically wrong. I myself believe Australia should have been internationally targeted long before any efforts at mostly dealing with any other nation’s emissions were still considered. Nonetheless, for all Flannery’s failures on the cultural front, “The Weather Makers” is still a most impressive widely read packed with information to arm yourself against the climate change sceptics and to harden your views if you are in doubt.