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
Fancy a sun-soaked timeshare in deepest Greenland? How about the Arctic? Well, get your orders in quickly and the wait time may be in your lifetime. When it gets very hot to soak up the rays at the Costa del Sol, you might be pleased to know that there will remain anywhere you can count on finally getting your tan up while not simultaneously getting carbonised (for a while, at least). That is the spectre that we are both starting to live with and speeding towards. We cannot allow to think of it so we consign it to the future. But all of us sense, know, we are experiencing it right now. Talk of the likely possibility of the slowly melting of the Greenland icecap, or of an ice-free Arctic and Antarctic appears fantastic, but it is really happening, at an tremendous rate, right now, and we know it but we can scarcely believe it. We are previously existing climate change and are clearly on a trajectory that is pointed in only one possible, and dire, direction unless the most major action is taken. The only question that remains is how long, unless action that is possible but depressingly unlikely is undertaken. Yet, because we have eventually left it so late, getting our heads above the rising tides and directly confronting that worse case scenario is now our only choice. While the possibility of annihilation by nuclear weapons handled by rogue states, such as North Korea, or groups’ such as Al Qaeda, or financial meltdown cannot be discounted, it is quickly becoming increasingly clear that politicans’, indeed everyone’s focus, has been on the illegal ball; a typical situation of diversion and procrastination while the water rises. As Al Gore points out in his movie side of An Inconvenient Truth, the condition of the economy and everything else is an irrelevancy in the surface of a planet which can no longer sustain individual life at the rate we are originally going, given our ever increasing demands on its limited resources. The stresses being what they are now, it stretches the imagination to think what things will be like when the population makes 9 billion, the projected figure for 2020. A rash of new publications, most notably Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, as well as Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe and, most famously, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, tries to sound the alarm bells for those who have not already woken up and smelled the carbon. Of all of the new additions to the genre, The Weather Makers takes out. Flannery, a palaeontologist and writer of fully deserved repute, is brilliantly placed to tell the story of how doomed is our civilisation unless we begin to really understand our relationship with our planet and start to live our lives in a sustainable way. While Kolbert, Gore et al do a good affair of effectively giving a sense of what is originally going on, Flannery solidly sketches the technical background and provides the great picture generally, situating the recent stresses we are placing on our environment in scientific and geo-historic perspective. For those desperately seeking a solid, well written and scientifically credible expos? of climate change, Flannery is an exceptional introduction, especially for usually lay persons. He survives to explain the science in a way which is extremely instructive without dumbing it down. While this text has been heavily criticised for being polemical, one can only retort that when the scientists create to become increasingly agitated, it is time to be extremely worried. Activist scientists? God forbid! As proven by this book, and countless other authorities, there is no serious scientific dissent considering climate change. The honest question is how to persuade, or defeat, the vested and selfish interests that would destroy our planet without conscience or care.