Tim
Flannery
The Weather Makers: The History and
Future Impact of Climate Change
Text, $32.95 pb, 332 pp, 1920885846
Ian
Lowe
Living in the Hothouse: How Global
Warming Affects Australia
Scribe, $26.95 pb, 322 pp, 1920769412
THE
FORMER CO-CHAIR of scientific assessment
for the UN’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John
Houghton, declared in 2003 that global
warming is a weapon of mass destruction
that is at least as dangerous as chemical,
biological or nuclear weapons and,
indeed, terrorism. It is therefore
no small irony that two prominent
members of the ‘coalition of
the willing’ and the world’s
two highest per capita carbon emitters
— the US and Australia —
should choose to devote so many resources
to eradicating conventional WMDs,
yet do so little to address global
warming. Australia’s stance on
climate change is logic-defying, unprincipled
and lacking in remorse. The Howard
government has refused to ratify the
Kyoto Protocol because of the short-term
economic costs to Australia, but it
claims that Australia will seek to
meet its Kyoto target anyway. But
Australia’s Kyoto target is so
generous relative to other developed
countries that it does not have to
do much to meet it.
The promised mandatory Kyoto cuts
in emissions by developed countries,
which average around 5.2 per cent,
will do little to stop global warming.
The IPCC has warned that carbon dioxide
emissions need to be reduced by sixty
to eighty per cent to protect the
earth’s atmosphere. Everything
depends on the next phase of negotiations.
The parties to the UN’s Framework
Convention on Climate Change will
meet at Montreal in December to work
towards a Kyoto Mark II, which will
require much bigger emissions reduction
targets from the developed world in
order to cut some slack for developing
countries to pursue their legitimate
aspiration to improve the quality
of life of their peoples. If the developed
world fails to lead by example, developing
countries (particularly growing emitters
such as China and India) are unlikely
to undertake commitments in phase
two of the negotiations.
Against this political backdrop, Tim
Flannery’s The Weather Makers
and Ian Lowe’s Living in the
Hothouse are particularly timely.
The general idea of global warming
has been popularised in Australia
since the late 1980s, but many people
still have only a dim appreciation
of the complexity of the science,
of the extraordinary scope and variability
of the impacts, and of the consequences
for human society and the environment.
Both books render these issues accessible
to a lay audience and make the case
for a transition to a post-carbon
economy urgent and compelling. They
show that, if greenhouse gas emissions
continue, the world will face mass
extinctions, water, energy and food
scarcity, the loss of reefs through
coral bleaching, rising sea levels,
coastal and infrastructural damage,
and human death and suffering resulting
from a growing incidence of ‘extreme
weather’.
Tim Flannery and Ian Lowe are two
very different personalities, with
different preoccupations. Flannery,
director of the South Australian Museum
and author of the best-seller The
Future Eaters (1994), offers a
flamboyant, Big Picture approach to
understanding climate change. He walks
the reader through the earth’s
climatic see-sawing up to and including
the new geological period known as
the Anthropocene, which dawned approximately
200 years ago with the Industrial
Revolution and the beginning of significant
human influences on the world’s
climate. Flannery’s warning is
that this may prove to be the shortest
geological period on record. In his
bestseller The End of Nature (1990),
Bill McKibben singled out global warming
as the most momentous and disturbing
environmental problem confronting
humankind because we have not only
changed the weather but also rendered
extinct the idea of nature as something
eternal and separate from us: ‘We
have deprived nature of its independence,
and that is fatal to its meaning.
Nature’s independence is its
meaning; without it there is nothing
but us.’ The Weather Makers
turns McKibben’s metaphysical
revelation on its head in a book that
could have been metaphorically titled
The End of Us. For Flannery,
human-induced global warming will
bring about not the end of nature
but rather the end of everything that
is worthy of humanity. Nature will
continue, as it always does, but in
a form that is deeply inhospitable
to human civilisation. Hurricane Katrina
has provided but a glimpse of this
loss of humanity, particularly towards
impoverished and marginalised social
classes — the lumpen-uninsured.
The Weather Makers is science
journalism at its best. It is engagingly
written and replete with eloquent
analogies that make complex scientific
ideas readily digestible. It is also
somewhat of a roller-coaster reading
experience, with unpredictable twists
and dives from chapter to chapter,
and no clear sense of direction, at
least in the early phase of the journey.
The ride moves, inevitably, from science
to politics and ends with a call for
action that is disappointingly lame
in view of all that has gone before.
Despite offering a damning political
indictment of the propaganda wars
of Big Oil and Big Coal (which, Flannery
suggests, have taken the place of
the tobacco and asbestos industries),
the book ends with a chapter entitled
‘Over to You’ — a DIY
manual on how individuals can reduce
their carbon emissions. While Flannery
is right, in principle, in arguing
that, if each of us reduced our individual
emissions by seventy per cent, we
could save the planet, this is a politically
naïve, voluntarist approach that
John Howard would doubtless welcome
as consistent with his government’s
emphasis on the importance of individual
choice. Well-meaning individual efforts
by the ‘carbon-conscious’
middle class, which can afford cleaner
technologies, will most certainly
help, but such actions are no substitute
for collective political agitation
and mobilisation (nationally and internationally)
to change social structures and economic
incentives that perpetuate carbon-intensive
production and consumption. Flannery’s
great strength is science, not politics.
Whereas
The Weather Makers offers a
Big Picture story addressed to an
international audience (albeit with
an Australian slant), Living in
the Hothouse is directly pitched
to an Australian audience and offers
a more fine-grained analysis of climate-change
science and policy in the Australian
context. It also provides a detailed
analysis of the likely impact of climate
change in Australia that makes sobering
reading, particularly for agencies
responsible for water supply in southern
Australia, farmers, operators of ski
resorts, tourist operators on the
Great Barrier Reef, anyone seeking
to buy or insure coastal property
and all those concerned about our
endangered fauna and flora. Lowe’s
Living in the Hothouse —
a sequel to his Living in the Greenhouse
(1989) — also offers a critical
overview of Australia’s policy
response to climate change that shows
(surprise, surprise) that we have
gone backwards rather than forwards
since the election of the Howard government
in 1996. As a scientist, environmental
policy practitioner and president
of the Australian Conservation Foundation,
Lowe has intimate knowledge of climate-change
policy in Australia, and draws heavily
on his extensive personal involvement
in federal, state and local government
committees and taskforces. Whereas
Flannery’s prose is impassioned
and occasionally dazzling, Lowe’s
is more like a measured after-dinner
speech, peppered with personal anecdotes
and his characteristic dry wit.
One niggling feature of both books
is the authors’ evasiveness on
the looming nuclear question. While
clearly acknowledging the dangers
of nuclear energy (stockpiles of radioactive
waste that lasts for tens of thousands
of years; and the security risks associated
with the increasing avail-ability
of enriched uranium suitable for nuclear
weapons), both authors shy away from
clearly spelling out their own position,
preferring instead to survey the arguments
and to leave it to readers to judge.
Lowe’s general assessment is
that the Australian public would probably
not accept nuclear power, while Flannery’s
is that it would not be economic.
Flannery, in particular, seems to
leave the door open to nuclear energy,
as if we must one day choose the lesser
of two evils. But if we accept John
Houghton’s analogy, it makes
no sense to forsake one WMD only to
replace it with something that leads
to the proliferation of another.
Australia is now part of what Lowe
has dubbed the ‘axis of environmental
irresponsibility’ in refusing
to face up to its international responsibilities.
As the Australian delegation prepares
for Montreal, we must give three cheers
for Flannery and Lowe — two of
our national eco-logical assets —
for keeping the Australian public
informed about what is at stake in
global warming.
