Zone5

“If this is global warming, let’s have more of it!” Gerard from the garage in Bantry said to me last week as he bought a copy of the new Sustainability magazine. The problem is, this is only the beginning of April and although it makes for great holiday weather, one wonders what it will be like in July. Will there be enough water? Will the roads start to melt? This is an El Nino year and the stage looks set for another record-breaking year of heat waves and hurricanes. With the publication of the latest report by the International Panel on Climate Change this week arriving during what seems like an exceptionally warm April- a heatwave I think we could say – I thought I might post a couple of reviews of books I read last year on the subject.

The Curse of Akkad

Field Notes from a Catastrophe Elizabeth Kolbert, Bloomsbury, 2006, 210pp

The Last Generation- How Nature will take her revenge for Climate Change Fred Pierce, Eden Project Books, 2006, 324pp

Climate change – or more specifically anthropocentric or man-made climate change – is here and now and beginning to rapidly change our world. Advances in the science over the last 10 years – which have provided evidence from the Arctic and Greenland ice-cores going back thousands of years – suggest an increasing likelihood that we will see abrupt and possibly catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate within our lifetimes. These changes could be comparable to those that the Earth underwent as it moved from ice-age to interglacial or vice-a-versa. The science has made considerable progress in the last 10-15 years and despite an imbalance in the media which tends to give equal air-time towards the tiny handful of “climate change skeptics” the consensus within the scientific community has strengthened.

Writes New York journalist Elizabeth Kolbert in Field Notes from a Catastrophe: “Ice core records … show that we are steadily drawing closer to the temperature peaks of the last interglacial, when sea levels were some fifteen feet higher than they are today. Just a few degrees more and the earth will be hotter than it has been at any time since our species evolved.” She concludes her carefully written environmental travelogue with the sober words: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing”.

From the other side of the Atlantic, English writer Fred Pierce has added to his over 20-years of reporting on climate change for New Scientist and his more than a dozen books on environmental issues with the starkly entitled The Last Generation.

This refers not-quite to the apocalyptic conclusions presented for example by James Lovelock in his recent The Revenge of Gaia that ours will be the last generation even to survive at all, but that ours is the last generation since the last ice-age that will have the comfort and security of living with a relatively stable and predictable climate. “The big new discovery is that planet Earth does not generally engage in gradual change”. Quoting Australian scientist Will Steffan early in the book, who says “abrupt change seems to be the norm, not the exception”, Pierce presents the nature of our predicament: “We have been lured into a false sense of security by the relatively quiet climatic era during which our modern complex civilisations have grown and flourished. This security has left us unexpectedly vulnerable as we stumble into a new era of abrupt change.”

Recent analyses of ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica have shown that in the past, roughly half the warming between the ice-ages and the post-glacial world took place in a single decade. Both these books cover a lot of similar ground: they are both excellent surveys of the state of climate science today, the evolution of theories of the interplay between the rise of the industrial society, rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and the impact on climate; both take the reader around the planet, from the frozen expanses of the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland, to the tropical jungles of the Amazon, the changing effects of rising temperatures on ocean currents and the impacts already being felt as south pacific islands disappear under rising sea-levels, changes in rainfall patterns affect crop production and heat-waves kill thousands across Europe and North America.

Kolbert’s book is the shorter of the two, very clear and easy to read, with just a little more focus on the human stories and a slightly more chatty style; Pierce’s covers a good deal more ground, and in more detail, and is especially effective in showing the various different opinions within the scientific community as regards what the main drivers in climate change are and guiding the reader through these sometimes complex concepts without pushing them into accepting any one version. Like all good science writers, he keeps us excitedly turning the pages to discover the net twist, the net maverick scientist who has turned up some new piece of the puzzle.

Climate science deals in big concepts, and to try and grasp the mechanics of a system as vast as that of the whole planet requires us to expand our point of reference, to think in terms of tens of thousands of years and of cycles of glacial and inter-glacial periods spanning millions of years; to think about natural cycles of weather patterns like El Nino and patterns of solar activity; and to try to grasp the interplay between concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, ocean currents that encircle the planet, forest fires in Borneo and melting ice-sheets in Antarctica; and then to witness the impact on human societies as landscapes that have been stable for thousands of years begin to alter completely before our very eyes. Kolbert is especially good at the latter, and begins her journey with the Inapuit peoples in the village of Shishmaref, on the small island of Sarichef in Alaska. Here, on the furthest outpost of America, traditional lifestyle based on fishing and hunting continues alongside the accoutrements of the modern world like SUVs. But in 2002, the entire village voted to move to the mainland because the melting of the pack ice that had protected the village from storm surges, together with the strengthening of those surges due to rising tides, was destroying the houses.

Kolbert intersperses the human story of the plight of Shishmaref with an account of the science of climate change. The first major study by the US National Academy of Sciences in 1979 concluded: “If CO2 continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result, and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.” “The effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere” writes Kolbert “is to throw the earth out of ‘energy balance’ and that to restore this balance, the entire planet has to heat up, including the oceans, a process … that could take ‘several decades’.” The approach of waiting for more evidence has been disastrous because of the time-lag in the effects of the build-up of CO2: even if we eliminate emissions immediately, warming will continue for a long time to come. Twenty-five years on, and emissions have continued to rise, despite truckloads of reports being issued and the evidence mounting of impending disasters. From the “drunken forests” of Alaska – caused by the abrupt melting of permafrost that has been frozen for thousands of years – to the “floating houses” of Holland now being built in expectation of increasing floods; the tracking of migration patterns of European butterflies northwards in England since Victorian times, the planned evacuation of the entire nation state of the pacific island of Tuvalu to New Zealand over the next few years, climate change is here and having a real and immediate effect on the livelihoods of millions. And we may only be just beginning to see the effects. Both books have a chapter entitled “The Curse of Akkad”. This refers to a text of that name telling the story of the Akkadian empire, ruled 4,200 years ago by the despot Sargon, who presided over a vast agricultural empire in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq.

For a long time, it was believed that the demise of Sargon’s empire after only a hundred years was due to political reasons and invasions from outside. Pierce quotes the archaeologist Harvey Weiss’s work which uncovered a “lost city” in Syria in the 70s which provided evidence of an abrupt abandonment of the city which filled up with layers of dust. This event was dated and traced to a “huge global dust spike” which has traces of dust that period in tropical ice cores. Although no-one knows for sure what caused this, it all points to a sudden and abrupt change in climate causing persistent droughts in many areas. Could history be as much a result of climate change in the past putting an end to whole civilisations in a matter of years? Kolbert also quotes Weiss: “Nothing allows you to go beyond the third or fourth year of a drought, and by the fifth or sixth year you’re probably gone”.

Another scientist Kolbert interviews, comparing these ancient events with the prognosis for future climate change in relation to drought in California, is David Rind, who says of the prospects for “adaptation” to changing climate of modern societies: “‘We may say that we’re more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is that it’s potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we’re not only more technologically able; we’re more technologically able destructively as well. I think it’s impossible to predict what will happen. I guess – though I won’t be around to see it – I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed’. He paused. ‘That’s sort of an extreme view’” Both books finish with a review of the current political responses and how well they fit in with the best-guess of science.

Pierce has a useful section in which he talks about total amount of carbon in the atmosphere, rather than concentrations of parts per million. This shows that industrial society has added about 200 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere in the last 2 centuries – making a total of 800 billion tonnes. We currently add about 4 billion tonnes each year. The best-guess “safe” limit – to avoid “runaway global warming” – is 850 billion tonnes total. Barring some complete economic meltdown, we are very unlikely to stay within this limit in the next 10-20 years. The section on technological fixes is the weak part of both books, because no account of peak oil is taken into account. For example, the idea of carbon sequestration – burying CO2 emissions from power stations in the ground – doesn’t allow for the extra energy involved and how difficult this will be as we end the era of cheap energy. Similarly, while energy efficiency is obviously a good idea, it doesn’t necessarily lead to a reduction in overall emissions or energy consumption and, in fact, can send the wrong signal to the market which rewards efficiency and can therefore encourage more growth.

Neither author quite manages to get to grips with the main problem confronting us, that of human overshoot. We have simply gone way beyond the carrying capacity of the earth and will have to suffer the consequences. In a way, what these consequences may be are either too terrible to contemplate, or too far removed from our everyday concerns of paying the mortgage and getting the kids to schools, and while Kolbert in particular makes a brave attempt at bringing home the human effects of climate change in different parts of the world, the issue of how to change the public consciousness is not really addressed. This is not in any way to detract from the excellence of these books, both of which should be read as widely as possible. They are excellent accounts of the enormity of the challenge that climate change presents in both scientific understanding and political response. But reading them one can only come to the conclusion that we need to adjust our approach: We cannot stop anthropocentric climate change. It is here, it is happening, the effects could change our world in this generation. We should do everything we can to reduce emissions and adapt to a low-energy lifestyle; but we should also begin to prepare for a less stable, more dangerous climate. The main points are that, while no-one can be sure exactly what the effects of climate change will be – anymore than we can predict accurately whether or not it will be raining here next Thursday – the evidence is increasing that sudden and abrupt changes have happened in the past in tandem with comparable changes in CO2 concentrations that are being caused by our industrial society. In other words, within a few years or decades, weather patterns that have remained relatively stable enough to nurture civilisation for thousands of years may be thrown into chaos. Even if we only think about the effect this could have on global food production, it is easy to see how the curse of Akkad could visit our modern day world again.