Heatwaves, hurricanes, flooding, drought, extinction. No-one can accuse Tim Flannery of understating the effects of global warming. And there's no doubting his passion for the subject. Once sceptical about climate change, he's now a fully-paid up member of the global warming warning brigade. His chapter headings alone - "Peril at the Poles", "The Carbon Dictatorship", "Boiling the Abyss" - signal that he's nailed his colours to the mast. And those colours are all green.
Not so long ago, climate change was confined to the inner reaches of scientific journals. Now it’s front page news. Hardly a day passes without another instance of wild weather being blamed on global warming. Flannery believes the changes we’ve seen in weather patterns, seasons, biodiversity and, above all, rising global temperatures have a single, man-made cause. Fossil-fuelled industrial development is the villain of the piece - from coal-fired power stations to the infernal combustion engine. So busy have we been in pillaging the Earth‘s resources that it’s only when the planet started fighting back that we woke up to the terrible consequences.
Of course, he’s aware that not all agree with this argument, and so he sets out to support it with an avalanche of evidence. At times, the reader risks being engulfed by statistics, and some of the scientific vocabulary requires both a deep breath and a running jump. Even so, Flannery’s genuine concern for all forms of life on the planet shines through.
But he has to tread carefully. Scary talk about runaway warming, may lead his readers to conclude that it's too late to do anything. Or, as Irving Berlin didn't write: there may be trouble ahead, but let's face the music and turn up the heating. Flannery insists the problem is still soluble, but tackling it will take action by every government, every business and every gas-guzzling, trash-tipping, pollution-pumping one of us.
Article comments
1 - Terry Ward
It takes a while to write a book and things, other than the climate, change. I expect a retraction of the stated "facts" in this treatise as much as I expect Al Gore to have his Nobel and Oscar taken back and the author, amongst many others, to be using all their hot air to thaw out their fingers before this decade is up.
Anthropogenic global warming is a tax exercise. I wish I could say it is nothing more but it has become a multi-billion dollar steamroller and threatens us all, none more so than the developing nations.
The Sun done it and it will get colder very soon.
2 - stueysplace
As usual we have our naysayers. The temperature trend is still up. The earthquake trend is still up. The droughts and wild storms are getting better. The ice is still melting. The theory that the sun did it is dead. Personally, I'd prefer to bet with the scientists and prepare.
3 - Terry Ward
In the UK our Treasury Department take things seriously even if the MSM do not. They released a report recently stating that global tempeperature will drop by 1.5C within the next couple of years because Solar cycles 24 and 25 will be similar to those of the Maunder minimum. The url is above.
I would love to see reasoned argument linking climate with earthquakes btw. Seriously.
4 - Terry Ward
I would like to point out this from "America's Newspaper"
Also: Where exactly was the nineties dust bowl?