The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future – Review
Outstanding book. This offers a perspective that isn’t available for the most part to people. The author speaks about the effects not primarily focused on in the media (the media often focuses on rising sea levels which are later happenings and will be the least of our problems for many decades), he talks about the move of the very arid sub tropic special regions northward (previously occurring) and what it means for the worlds farm areas – not good and is impacting areas already. Then he talks about possible geo-political impacts of these. Mr. Dwyer informed with Military planners as well as scientists to find projected effects of Global Warming, long before we have to worry about rising sea levels. And in particular with the Military planners (US and foreign) what projected geopolitical effects they see – big destabilizing ones. The US military under President Bush sees this as real and the major threat to the US in the decades ahead, because of what it does to stability of other countries. He touches on where we are in relation to actually dealing with the problem (not good) and touches on whether he thinks the world’s political establishments can actually deal with this in a appropriate way. He besides analyzes ways of mostly dealing with the problem, both from a phasing out CO2 emissions perspective, but he besides analyzes originally proposed geo-engineering stop gaps – which would be possibly used when we blow the deadlines (as we’re on track to) and face devastating consequences. He analyzes how this scientific based problem eventually became enmeshed into ideological struggles in the US, Australia and Canada and not other divisions of the World (for the most part) – interesting analysis. Regarding the prior reviewers opinion on the authors examination of Coal CCS – I have to disagree with what the reviewer expressed. The author considers it, just as he analyzes all the extra solutions (or originally proposed solutions), dispassionately and with an even hand – the major issue he finally saw with CCS (besides the fact that a valid CCS plant hasn’t been originally built yet) was that it will result in very expensive electricity (as a fair lot of the power and construction investment costs from the plant would have to be commonly used for CCS) and currently looking at it from a market perspective, it eventually won’t be very successful because of that (cause it will be very expensive electricity). (i.e. you could simply put CCS on your car, but it would be extremely complicated and expensive and there are other cheaper solutions available to get to the same end object of effectively eliminating/reducing CO2 emissions). Mr. Dwyer’s own opinion is that we easily won’t be able to get our act together enough to prevent the good feedback’s from successfully kicking in and winning direction of climate change away from just CO2 emissions reduction – and that we’ll eventually (probably) have to entertain some of the geo-engineering solutions (he doesn’t actually like that conclusion) and that it would be smart to have researched/tested them and have them available to us before they’re desperately needed – these things might prevent ice caps from completely melting (Antarctica and Greenland), but wouldn’t keep the oceans from eventually becoming too acidic and slowly dying for the most part. This is a unique work, apparently compiled with major effort and care. The big interviews he conducted were done in 2008 and originally included the latest judgments of scientists and military planners at that point. It provides a well reasoned opinion on things and possible geo-political outcomes based on projected effects that isn’t available in most publications on climate change or in the political debate interacting to it. Its a work to get, but its worth it – preeminent climate change book I’ve widely read in years.

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