The Weathermakers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change
By Tim Flannery
Text Publishing, 2005
332 pages, $32.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Who cares about Bufo perigelenes, the golden toad of Costa Rica? We all should, argues Australian scientist Tim Flannery, in his book The Weathermakers, because in 1989 the last surviving member of this spectacular golden frog species disappeared from the planet. This extinction was definitively recorded by scientific literature as "the first documented victim of global warming".
"We had killed it with our profligate use of coal-fired electricity and our oversize cars", writes a hot-under-the-collar Flannery about the drying up of the mountain pools necessary for the survival of the species' tadpoles. Frog extinctions are sentinels of global warming and a similar fate awaits hundreds of thousands of animals and plants — on coral reefs and ice-packs, in rainforests and oceans — all victims of drastic changes to breeding cycles, migration routes and the food web, as global temperature rises at a geologically unprecedented rate.
This dismantling of ecosystems is a direct result of human-caused emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that trap the long wavelength (heat) energy of the sun's rays. Although US President George Bush demands "more certainty", the weight of world scientific opinion is solidly behind the assertion that carbon-rich fossil fuels are the driving force behind global warming.
The CO2 released from combusted coal, oil and trees has already warmed the planet by 0.6 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution and the rate of increase is accelerating. Nine out of the 10 warmest years ever recorded have been since 1990. While scientists in the mid-1970s were debating whether the Earth was headed for warming or cooling, 30 years later the only real debate is about the timeframe and quantum of warming, with none of the options particularly cheery.
The results are already being felt now, and not just by Bufo perigelenes. Coral reefs, bleached and dying, are on the brink of collapse. More than 20% of the polar ice cap at the North Pole has melted away since 1979. A series of unwelcome firsts has been logged on the weather record — the most powerful El Nino, the most powerful hurricane, the first South Atlantic hurricane, the hottest European summer, the worst storm season in Florida. Computer models, more scientifically mature and mathematically sophisticated, predict more severe droughts and floods, and more rain for areas that don't need it while putting other areas in perpetual rainfall deficit. There will be winners, however — the parasites that cause malaria will expand their range as tropical conditions spread to formerly temperate and disease-free regions.
There are some scientists who doubt human-caused global warming and this slim fraction of the scientific community is keeping alive the fiction of a serious scientific debate. The fossil fuel industry, says Flannery, has its court scientists, paid to scoff at scientific consensus, just as tobacco companies employ tame scientists to constantly challenge and cloud the outcomes of independent research into the causal link between their products and lung cancer. The aim is the same, says Flannery — "buying themselves a few more decades of fat profits". Flannery's injunction to "follow the money" turns up industry funding of many so-called "climate change sceptics".
To complement their scientific glove-puppets, oil and coal companies also purchase political marionettes through donations to politicians in the US and Australian governments. Not that these regimes need much corrupting, as their business is the protection of business. In Australia, Flannery reminds us, PM John Howard appointed the chief technologist of coal mining giant Rio Tinto as the government's chief scientist, and coal industry executive and share-owner Senator Warwick Parer was the minister for minerals and energy.
So it is that the big carbon-polluters, Australia and the US, are two of only four countries (along with the tax dodgers' playgrounds of Monaco and Liechtenstein) holding out against the United Nations Kyoto Protocol with even its modest and inadequate greenhouse gas reduction targets. Canberra's obstinance is particularly shameful because Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions, and the fastest rate of growth in emissions, of all industrialised countries.
Canberra claims "special circumstances" that would make it too costly to meet the Kyoto targets, but Flannery despatches this special pleading with ease. Yes, Australia has a heavy dependence on fossil fuels (90% of our electricity is generated by burning coal), but "this is a matter of choice rather than necessity", especially given Australia's abundance of renewable energy sources (geothermal, wind and solar). Yes, Australia is a large, sparsely populated continent, but over 60% of our transport fuel is used in densely settled urban areas where less oil-dependent transport options are highly feasible.
Canberra's argument that it would be too costly to the economy to comply with Kyoto is also weak. Flannery discusses the systematic bias of government costing studies, which overestimate the regulatory and other costs of change while underestimating the economic, environmental and social costs of doing nothing. There are no government studies on the cost of not taking action.
Another escape clause invoked against Kyoto by Canberra and Washington is that the developing countries are not bound by the protocol but, as Flannery argues on natural justice gounds, it is the developed world that has created the problem, so countries like Australia and the US should carry the bulk of the burden.
If forced to admit that the greenhouse effect is real, the carbon polluters' second line of defence is the "techno-fix" — the engineering scheme that allows the polluters to posture that they are doing something about the problem while carrying on "business as usual". Flannery carefully dissects the wide range of grandiose but chimerical techno-fixes, from fertilising the oceans with iron filings to sequestration of liquified CO2 in the ocean depths or underground, to reveal schemes that are expensive, unproven, energy-intensive, inefficient and which carry the baggage of unintended and potentially severe side-effects. To compound matters, the Howard and Bush governments throw billions of dollars of public money at these non-solutions.
Other proposed solutions also fail to measure up to Flannery's sceptical probing. Natural gas is a doubtful saviour because, although it contains much less carbon than coal or oil, it is 60 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, and even a tiny percentage lost through leaks would undo its advantage over its fossil fuel cousins. Hydrogen is often touted as the "silver bullet solution" to oil for transport. Yet the problems of storage and distribution are considerable, whilst its extreme volatility turns cars running on hydrogen into potential car bombs, able to be sparked into explosion by mobile phones, the static electricity generated by sliding over a car seat, or an electrical storm two kilometres away. Time to solve these technical barriers is not on our side.
Most of Flannery's solutions to global warming are practical and highly desirable. Governments could, for example, financially support renewable energy, pass energy efficiency laws for housing, whitegoods and transport; and remove electricity cross-subsidies that favour industry, thus making big energy users sensitive to price signals and therefore serious about energy efficiency.
Some of Flannery's ideas, however, are politically naive. He wants us to put our trust in the market. If more of us bought solar hot water systems and a Toyota Prius (with its hybrid petrol-electric engine), the market would respond, he believes. This strategy, however, is cavalier about the cost barriers to a consumer-led revolution and can lend itself to the guilt-tripping of individuals. The market, alas, is the problem — the power of capital allows it to write the market rules that shore up easy profits from exploiting under-priced fossil fuels.
One of Flannery's solutions is downright dangerous. Sadly, Flannery entertains (albeit unhappily) nuclear power as an answer to global warming despite acknowledging the danger it poses from radiation accidents and radioactive waste, and its role in the nuclear weapons cycle. Flannery's reluctant nuclear recipe is borne out of desperation by a sincere environmentalist anxiously looking for a shortcut that bypasses a radical political challenge to the oil and coal capitalists and their government protectors.
Flannery's nuclear option falls flat in a book which, despite this lapse, is scientifically robust, highly accessible in popularising the sometimes complex science of global warming, and utterly committed to the urgency of facing — and solving — our greatest environmental threat.
From Green Left Weekly, December 7, 2005.
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