Hot Under the Collar

Article

Hot under the collar
Richard Girling salutes angry books on global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert, Tim Flannery and Fred Pearce
There’s a hilarious mo- ment in Elizabeth Kolbert’s aptly titled Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Blooms-bury £14.99) when she is granted a 20-minute interview with Paula Dobriansky, George W Bush’s undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs. To Dobriansky falls the task of explaining the superiority of America’s yee-haw, floor-the-accelerator response to global warming, over the rest of the world’s ratification of the Kyoto protocol.
Are there any circumstances, Kolbert wonders, in which the administration might accept mandatory restrictions on carbon emissions? “We act, we learn, we act again,” intones Dobriansky. How urgent is the need to stabilise emissions? “We act, we learn, we act again,” she repeats. What might constitute a dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? “We act, we learn, we act again.”
It is a cherishable moment, not least because comedic interludes in these three books are as rare as penguins in the Sahara. The most alarming fact is that they are necessary; that there could still remain, anywhere in the world, voices of influence prepared to deny the reality or imminent danger of anthropogenic climate change. It is not dummies such as Dobriansky, or even Bush, who are the reservoirs of infection, but rather their string-pullers in the automobile, oil, coal and power industries for whom freedom to gas-guzzle is more sacred than African or Asian lives. More sacred even than the safety of their own children’s children. “It’s not necessarily a reflection on the intellectual capacities of those involved,” as Tim Flannery puts it in The Weather Makers (Allen Lane £20), “but rather its capacity to be bought.”
These are scorchingly angry books. All three nail the lies, defying you to read and still declare yourself a “climate sceptic”. Real scepticism, as opposed to Bush’s brand of economic bigotry, is as much a tool of scientific inquiry as the microscope or the computer. Real scepticism drives you to question your own and other people’s theories and assumptions. It’s what scientists do: they are professional sceptics. The environment movement has not always been well served by proselytisers crashing the cymbals, drowning out the measured and meticulously footnoted reasoning of the researchers whose findings they exaggerate. Not with climate change, though. As Fred Pearce notes in The Last Generation (Eden Project £12.99): “Here it is the people who have been in the field the longest, the researchers with the best reputations for doing good science and the professors with the biggest CVs and longest lists of published papers who are the most fearful, often talking in the most dramatic language.” The more you know, the worse it gets.
Inevitably these books overlap, but each picks its own way through what, in less expert hands, would be a trackless swamp of detail. Kolbert’s is the shortest and easiest read. A staff writer for The New Yorker, she evokes with unfussy elegance her visits to climatic disaster scenes and calmly — though one can hardly say dispassionately — records what she hears and sees: shrinking sea ice, receding glaciers, thawing permafrost, displaced people. Her focus is upon the frozen north, where permafrost is melting for the first time in 120,000 years, releasing yet more CO2 as it exposes a vast organic reservoir of ice-trapped vegetation and triggers yet another surge in warming. But, she says, “I could have gone to hundreds if not thousands of other places — from Siberia to the Austrian Alps to the Great Barrier Reef to the South African fynbos — to document its effects. These alternate choices would have resulted in an account very different in its details, but not in its conclusions.”
The proof of this is supplied by Flannery and Pearce. Flannery’s book is nothing less than a user’s manual for the planet. An Australian scientific heavyweight with a background in zoology, he knows there is not a whisker or bud that is not the product of its climate, or is not threatened by the changes under way. He is a master of cause and effect, explaining, for example, why the warming of the Indian Ocean causes drought in the Sahel. Along with the horror, he serves a generous helping of fine-grained detail that improves our understanding of the natural world even as it increases our anxiety for its future.
Fred Pearce is exactly what his publishers say he is — one of Britain’s finest science writers. He is a sceptic of the best sort, saying nothing until he has seen the truth of it for himself, from Greenland’s developing “lake district” to the fire-ravaged Amazon and vanishing peat bogs of Siberia. When he tells us that the climate is changing even faster than we had thought, that tsunamis in the North Atlantic are a credible risk and that 90% of the Arctic permafrost will have melted to a depth of 3m by 2100, then we had better consider our position. These are three very fine books. Read one yourself, then press it into the hands of the nearest sceptic.

Discussion

The oil, coal, and power industries are largely responsible for America’s current attitude towards global climate destabilization. By denying the reality, they have made the American public uncertain of the true nature and extent of the problem they are currently facing and it is books and publications like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe, which are absolutely necessary to deliver the true message to the public today. Those denouncing climate change science, call themselves skeptics. The proper skeptics, however are the real scientists only, because their work demands that they question their findings and that they test their assumptions and theories multiple times. Their findings are systematically and accessibly laid out in Kolbert’s book. “Shrinking sea ice, receding glaciers, thawing permafrost, displaced people”, those are all consequences of rising temperatures, caused by the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. These temperatures in turn cause the release of further ice-trapped gases, which add to the pace of warming. Kolbert’s observations, which she collected all over the globe lay out the urgent necessity for action and the convincing arguments for the reasons why action is necessary.

Girling, Richard. "Hot under the collar." Sunday Times 25 June 2006 7 Aug 2008 .