The Pile Grows...

Tim Flannery (2006), The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (Washington: Atlantic Monthly: 0871139359).

Comments

[christofay]

Off topic. Is it just me, or was this site down for several days?

What's the solution, we all should be contributing so you can lease from a more robust source?

Why isn't the Drudge ever down?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/books/review/12zimmer.html?ex=1299819600&en=6628f641b8917904&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

March 12, 2006

Sweating It
By CARL ZIMMER

It would be hard to imagine a better time for these two important books to appear. The science of global warming has been making dramatic headlines. NASA scientists recently reported that 2005 was the hottest year on record. Researchers studying the oldest core of Greenland ice yet extracted have also reported that there is more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any other point in the past 650,000 years. The vast majority of climate scientists agree that if we continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the world's temperature will climb significantly, and new computer models project a grim scenario of droughts and rising sea levels. Global warming is a fiendishly complex scientific puzzle, and "The Weather Makers" and "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" help show how the individual pieces fit together into a worrying whole.

It's also a fiendishly complex political puzzle, and there may not be much time to decide how to act. Some leading climate scientists warn that we might be as few as 20 years away from a "tipping point," after which it will be too late to reverse catastrophic change. Yet so far such warnings have not led to much meaningful action. The Bush administration proposes cutting carbon emissions by investing in hybrid cars and other futuristic technologies. Meanwhile, many of the nations that signed the Kyoto Protocols are failing to meet their own targets.

Tim Flannery, a distinguished Australian scientist, and Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker, hope to seize this moment and make the world take global warming seriously. "If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable," Flannery warns. His book may be having an impact already: last October, Australia's environment minister cited Flannery's book when he told a reporter unequivocally that the debate over global warming was over and industrialized nations needed to take urgent action. Still, it's hard to know whether these two passionate, well-researched books will have an enduring effect or will just join a long list of earlier titles on global warming that have not slowed down the greenhouse express. And both books have flaws that may blunt their effectiveness.

While "The Weather Makers" and "Field Notes From a Catastrophe" cover much of the same scientific ground, they are not carbon copies. Flannery, who has written several previous books for a popular audience, takes a long view, offerng an account of the history of earth's shifting climate. Climate change, he makes clear, is itself nothing new, and organisms have long played a role in it. Ever since earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, heat-trapping gases have kept the atmosphere warm. The planet has simmered and cooled, its changing temperature influenced in part by fluctuating levels of greenhouse gases. Life itself has helped control global warming, both by absorbing greenhouse gases and then by releasing them at death. Sometimes this release has been catastrophic. About 55 million years ago, Flannery writes, a surge of carbon dioxide and methane (another greenhouse gas) flooded the atmosphere, raising the average surface temperature of the earth by 9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit and causing mass extinctions in what he calls a "vast, natural gas-driven equivalent of a barbecue." Scientists suggest that much of the gas had been stored at the bottom of the sea floor by methane-producing bacteria.

Over the past 50 million years, the planet has been gradually cooling as those greenhouse gases dwindled. Antarctica, once covered by forests and roamed by dinosaurs, grew an ice cap. The earth fell into a cycle of ice ages, in which glaciers expanded and then retreated over tens of thousands of years. The trigger for this cycle was probably earth's wobbly orbit, which changes the amount of sunlight reaching the poles. But greenhouse gases seem to have helped drive the cycle. At the beginning of each ice age, levels of carbon dioxide and methane plunge, and at the end they surge back.

The last ice age ended 13,000 years ago, and by 8,000 years ago the global climate had settled into a comparatively stable lull. This "long summer," as Flannery calls it, may have made civilization possible. Only then did agriculture and cities flourish and spread. Ironically, though, civilization brought with it a new source of greenhouse gases — ourselves. By burning wood, coal and oil, humans liberated the carbon stored away by other forms of life. Viewed on a geological scale, it's as if a bomb went off....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/opinion/l24glacier.html

The Globe Is Warming. Why Aren't We Marching?

To the Editor:

The world we have known is history. A mere 1 degree Fahrenheit global average warming is already raising sea levels, strengthening hurricanes, disrupting ecosystems, threatening parks and protected areas, causing droughts and heat waves, melting the Arctic and glaciers everywhere and killing tens of thousands of people a year.

Yet there are several more degrees coming in our grandchildren's lifetimes.

It is easy to feel like a character in a bad science fiction novel running down the street shouting "Don't you see it!" while life goes on, business as usual.

Climate change is the biggest thing to happen here on earth in thousands of years, with incalculable environmental, social and economic costs. But there is no march on Washington; students are not in the streets; consumers are not rejecting destructive lifestyles; Congress is not passing far-reaching legislation; the president is not on television explaining the threat to the country; Exxon is not quaking in its boots; and entire segments of evening news pass without mention of the climate emergency.

Instead, 129 new coal-fired power plants are being developed in the United States alone, and so on.

There are many of us caught in this story. We must find one another soon.

James Gustave Speth
New Haven, Feb. 20, 2006
The writer, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, was administrator of the United Nations Development Program, 1993-99.

[Max]

May I suggest:
The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer R. Weart

ISBN: 0674016378

Excellent Read!

Back to work now.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Also, Weart's book is elaborated at his extraordinary website for the American Institute of Physics:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html

[Karlsfini]

Yeah, Brad, what happened to the site?

I'm with Christofay, I'll help you anyway I can. I'm betting there's an inexpensive solution.

One of the most serious problems -- but seldom mentioned -- is actic peat. Peat hold a vast reservoir of trapped carbon dioxide that is released as the peat thaws.

We may have already pulled the trigger on this one, and it won't be easy to recall the bullet no matter what measures puny humans now take.

(When Arctic plants die they don't decay -- too cold -- but form peat, which holds trapped CO2. Tundra is a "carbon sink" -- it absorbs more CO2 from the atmosphere than it releases. As peat warms, however, the plants began to decay, releasing the greenhouse gases CO2 and methane.)

Arctic peat has been taking CO2 out of the atmosphere for 10,000 years. As it warms it is starting to let the CO2 go. This promises to be a big deal.

If you're intending to see the Artic before it's gone, be sure and take along "A Naturalist's Guide to the Artic" by E.C. Pielou. It's light, compact and meant for roughing it.

Unless you read that book, I don't know how you will know why there's no full moon during the Actic summer. The other phases of the moon, yes. but not full moons.

[Karlsfini]

I swear I know how to spell "arctic."

[Ari]

Remo Williams is viciously trolling.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/books/16gosn.html?ex=1300165200&en=367d273df3327680&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

March 16, 2006

In Epoch of Man, Earth Takes a Beating
By MARIANA GOSNELL

"The whole world is going too fast," an Inuit hunter from Banks Island in the Northwest Territories in Canada told the journalist Elizabeth Kolbert at a bar during a global-warming symposium. A few years before, he and his neighbors had started seeing robins, birds they had no name for. At first the milder weather that drew the robins north seemed a good thing — "warmer winters, you know," he said — but as other changes occurred that affected their traditional way of life, including hunting, it did not seem so good. "Our children may not have a future," the hunter concluded. "I mean, all young people, put it that way. It's not just happening in the Arctic. It's going to happen all over the world."

For "Field Notes From a Catastrophe," Ms. Kolbert went not exactly all over the world to find out what's happening with global warming but to a great many places in it, and she often heard the same elegiac expressions of foreboding, loss and fear for the next generation. In Shishmaref, Alaska, she met people who were abandoning their tiny island home because, with less sea ice around it as a buffer against storms, their houses and land were being carried away. ("It makes me feel lonely," one woman said of the forced move.) In Iceland, a man monitoring glacial advance and retreat passed on the prediction that by the end of the next century, his country, where glaciers have existed for more than two million years, will be essentially ice-free. On the Greenland ice cap, well away from the coast, researchers gathering meteorological data were surprised to see melt "in areas where liquid water had not been seen for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years."

And so it went in Fairbanks; Yorkshire; Eugene, Ore. "Such is the impact of global warming," Ms. Kolbert points out, that she could have gone to countless other places, "from Siberia to the Austrian Alps to the Great Barrier Reef to the South African fynbos — to document its effects."

Ms. Kolbert, a former reporter for The New York Times, doesn't doubt that human-induced global warming is real and will likely have dire consequences; the title of her book includes the word "catastrophe." The pages are replete with bad news: perennial sea ice, which 25 years ago covered an area of the Arctic the size of the continental United States, has since lost an area "the size of New York, Georgia and Texas combined." Carbon dioxide levels, if emissions go unchecked, could reach three times pre-industrial levels by the end of the century....

[meno]

remo,

There's a vast, VAST logical gap between the observation that some areas of technology are rapidly improving, and your apparent belief that this will mean less (rather then more) greenhouse gas emissions.

Technological change over the last 50 years means that we're using vastly more energy now, ie we're producing vastly more greenhouse gasses now. The technical ability to produce less greenhouse gasses isn't the problem - we have that now. The problem is willpower, not ability.

You wanna point to relevant technological change, do so. Pointing to irrelevant change doesn't help.

You wanna talk about change in technology of energy systems, or provide evidence that tech change will help instead of hinder us regard global warming, then go ahead. You wanna wander off-topic and argue about Moore's Law, find another thread.

Main energy sources in use now for transport, heating, lighting, etc: oil, gas, coal, nuclear, smattering of wind and solar. Nuclear declining, wind increasing.

Main energy sources in use 50 years ago for transport, heating, lighting, etc: coal, oil, gas, smattering of wind. Nuclear increasing.

[still working it out]

If you ever have the time, Tim Flannery's "The Future Eaters" is a facinating book as well.

Completely changed my thinking on the relationsip between humans and the environment.