Tim Flannery's

THE WEATHER MAKERS

reviewed by
PETER CHRISTOFF

Peter Christoff teaches at the University of Melbourne and is Vice-President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

_________________________

The parties to the annual United Nations Convention on Climate Change met in Buenos Aires last year. At one point, while key bureaucrats debated arcane points of phraseology, scientists in a separate room delivered dire predictions about the melting Arctic icecap. An Inuit elder described how global warming had already transformed her homeland into something strange and dangerous. New plants, vanishing animals, treacherous sea ice, rendered 1000 years' tradition and adaptation useless. Within decades, her culture would be extinct, along with the seals and polar bears upon which it depends. This was climate genocide.

How to convey to the bureaucrats this sense of desperate urgency? The great importance of The Weather Makers lies in its capacity to publicize climate change and its catastrophic consequences at a time when media are scrutinizing the trends behind massive cyclones, melting polar caps, the defrosting tundra and retreating glaciers. Flannery is passionate about educating us about global warming in the hope of disrupting our -- and key decision makers' -- lethal complacency.

His skills as a writer and ability to stir up public debate are widely recognized and, here, keenly deployed. Like Jared Diamond and Stephen Jay Gould, he has the ability, rare in Australia, to take complex ideas and -- seemingly effortlessly -- make them accessible. This is his most powerfully engaged book and contains some of his finest prose. Employing a broad vision of geological time, Flannery explains the mechanisms that have driven the planet's climate. He brings to life the world that laid down our store of fossil fuels just as effectively as he popularizes the theories of Milankovitch, a relatively obscure but brilliant theorist of the Earth's ice ages.

This book captures your imagination through its extraordinary range of argument, its vivid imagery, its wealth of research, quick wit and richness of detail. It succeeds where equally worthy but more prosaic recent books have failed. Given the span of issues -- the origins of fossil fuels and the composition of our atmosphere; theories of ice ages past, the possibilities of a new ice age and the potential sources of climate catastrophe; the extinction of mammals in the New Guinea highlands; the future of the Great Barrier Reef; geosequestration and emissions trading; the future of hydrogen power, geothermal power, wind power and much more -- you need to read it carefully, twice.

Yet this abundance is also a liability. Flannery has a bower bird's habit for gathering bright objects, a lyrebird's capacity for weaving others' ideas and exclamations into a mesmerizing tune of his own and a scrub turkey's ability to hide things in a large mound. At times, critical facts, issues and arguments are buried and the book almost needs commentators to sift it for key points. (The book's referencing is shambolic, its index weak.)

Given Flannery's transformative ambitions and his message of urgency, it is surprising what lies buried in the book's middle. Here, Flannery explains there is a lag of several decades before greenhouse gases already emitted by burning coal, oil and gas are realized as global warming: we are already committed to a further increase in average global temperature. We have already endured an average increase of 0.8 degrees since the Industrial Revolution. Growing scientific consensus indicates that a rapid increase of more than 2 degrees constitutes "dangerous climate change," causing mass extinctions and social and economic disruption. Global fossil fuel use has accelerated extraordinarily over the past three decades. Therefore, there is no capacity for significant additional global carbon emissions or time to waste in the transition to a post-carbon future. But this point is lost; the tougher conclusion is fudged.

The problem of global equity runs through the politics of climate, yet this barely rates a mention. Developing countries such as China and India -- growing giants in terms of future emissions -- rightly insist on "carbon emissions room" to increase their standards of living. To remain within a safe planetary carbon budget, commensurate deep cuts for the West are likely to be not 60 or 70 per cent but up to 80 and 90 per cent of current emission levels. To achieve this equitable balance rapidly involves not just hoping for a technological escape route but also, for us, significant demand management and reduced energy use. The idea of "contracting and converging" requires the sort of politics and regulation that Flannery barely considers. Instead, he mainly emphasises voluntary action and the market.

Flannery is equivocal, even sanguine, about the future of nuclear power, mainly because he does not consider the full weight of public subsidies and the distortions they mean for the price of renewable energy alternatives. Overall, political and economic analyses are the book's weak suit, in an otherwise very strong hand.

Sometimes, in accidents, time almost freezes and we watch, horrified, fascinated as events unfold in slow motion. But quick action may reduce its impact. Flannery and many others now tell us climate change is inevitable and potentially devastating. But we have a little time to soften the blow.

Given this awareness, how should we see John Howard and those captains of industry who are putting the foot on the accelerator? At what point will they bear personal responsibility for decisions that we, like the Inuit elder now, will soon understand to be carbon crimes against humanity and other species?

This review was first printed in Habitat, the magazine of the Australian Conservation Foundation, December 2005.