Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
By Elizabeth Kolbert
Bloomsbury, 210 pages, $22.95
The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
By Tim Flannery
Atlantic Monthly Press, 357 pages, $24
MANY PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY are still confused about whether the global warming that we all sense is happening is a natural fluctuation in the Earth’s climate, and therefore probably nothing to worry about, or a consequence of human actions, in which case we may actually have to do something about it.
The unequivocal answer put forth by Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” is that the rapid warming–if trends continue it will be hotter at the end of the century than at any point in the last 2 million years–is due to human activities that date back at least to the 1780s, when James Watt’s steam engine began devouring coal and belching out carbon dioxide. Both authors blame government and industry obfuscation for the confusion in the public mind.
Carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases, traps heat near Earth’s surface, permitting more moisture to be taken up in the air. The extra water vapor, which is an even more potent greenhouse gas, then traps more heat. As Kolbert explains in her elegant report on the state of the warming, the planet has responded slowly and with delay to the increase in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, but now that the warming has started, the pace is accelerating, and it’s not clear when it is going to stop.
She notes that since 1979, 250 million acres of sea ice have melted; that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster by the year; that by the end of the century Iceland will be virtually ice free. Most worrisome of all, models predict that if temperature trends continue, at least 15 percent of all species will become extinct; and if carbon dioxide levels double over pre-industrial levels, serious drought will affect most of the U.S. by the end of the century.
These are astonishing statistics and horrifying predictions, and yet Kolbert, a staff writer for New Yorker magazine, rarely indulges an emotion, as she does when she decides to hike up for a second look at an unlovely glacier in Iceland that may not survive the century.
The book opens in Shishmaref, Alaska, a tiny, centuries-old Inupiat village on an island just off the Seward Peninsula, where people are packing up to move to the mainland because the sea has begun swamping them. From there she goes to England, where butterflies once confined to small territories are turning up in areas previously believed to be too cold for them, and to the low-lying Netherlands, where, in anticipation of flooding, some people have begun living in houses that can float.
She contrasts the leadership of American science in defining global warming with the Bush administration’s wait-and-see attitude. In an interview with Kolbert, U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona characterizes President Bush’s position on global warming as ” `MIA.’ ” Allotted 20 minutes for an interview with Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs and the U.S. spokeswoman on global warming, Kolbert gets redundant and scripted non-answers that sound like old Kremlin communiques.
But what can be done?
Kolbert visits Burlington, Vt., which in 2002 launched a campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent. The city, among other things, provided energy consultations to businesses, sponsors a market for the resale of items from demolition projects, and, in a largely symbolic gesture, set up a single wind turbine, which generates power for 30 homes. The best the good-hearted citizens of Burlington could do was reduce their energy use by 1 percent.
“China’s new [coal-fired power] plants would burn through all of Burlington’s savings–past, present, and future–in less than two and a half hours,” Kolbert notes dryly.
While Kolbert’s eyewitness report provides more than enough ammunition to agitate people at a dinner party, Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” is an almost encyclopedic review of the issue of global warming. He offers useful primers on many aspects of climate change, including the carbon cycle–the way carbon moves from the atmosphere into the ocean, rocks and living organisms–and the formation of coal, oil and natural gas. All three fossil fuels are the remains of plants and animals that absorbed their energy from the sun millions of years ago, in effect taking carbon out of circulation.
One disconcerting fact Flannery notes is that 422 years of energy from the sun are required to make the fuel burned in the world in just one year.
Another is that burning 1 ton of coal, which is the most abundant and widely distributed of the fossil fuels, yields 4 tons of carbon dioxide, much more than that released by burning oil or natural gas. That’s unfortunate, given that most of the world’s electricity is produced by coal-fired power plants (including 23 in Illinois).
Before Watt’s steam engine launched the Industrial Revolution, there were about 280 parts of carbon dioxide per million in the atmosphere; today there are 380 parts per million. Since 1975, when the question of carbon dioxide levels was first raised seriously, climate models have consistently predicted that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide could lead to an increase of 5 degrees Fahrenheit or more in global temperature. Flannery believes that the consequences of the temperature increase already locked in by current carbon dioxide levels are dire enough: plant and animal extinctions, water shortages in cities and droughts, more Katrinas.
“If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable,” he warns.
Just short of outright disaster but with “serious damage to Earth’s ecosystems,” he foresees the creation of an “Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control” that could grow increasingly dictatorial as it struggled to control global emissions. Significant decarbonization efforts of the electricity grid must begin immediately, but in an excellent overview of possible solutions, he sees no easy answers.
He finds many problems with a process known as carbon sequestration, in which carbon emissions from coal-fired plants are captured and then pumped back into the ground for storage. Before being stored the carbon dioxide must be compressed into liquid, “a step that typically consumes 20 percent of the energy yielded by burning coal in the first place.” What’s more, the Earth’s crust is not a safe place to store the gas, which could be deadly if leaked.
As for fuel for transportation, Flannery is cool to corn-derived ethanol (here, too, the quantity of fuel it takes to grow the corn wipes out most of the carbon savings) but loves the Toyota Prius, a gas-and-electricity-powered hybrid that, relative to Toyota’s four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, “cuts fuel use and CO2 emissions by around 70 percent.”
“The most important thing to realize is that we can all make a difference and help combat climate change at almost no cost to our lifestyle,” he suggests.
A “climate change checklist” advises walking, cycling or taking public transportation, which “can eliminate transport and household emissions,” and using a water-saving showerhead that lowers heating costs and can yield “up to 12 percent reduction in household emissions.”
Such simplistic suggestions at first seem almost sadly comical, given the enormity of the problem, not to mention the fact that in this country global warming is a back-burner issue. But then you realize that to do nothing would be unconscionable.
