The Weather Makers...
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The Weather Makers:
How Man is Changing the Climate
and What it Means for Life on Earth
by Tim Flannery
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006
(paperback, 2007)
What does climate change mean for life on earth? Among other things, it means that if you’re a European ski resort located under 1,500 meters, chances are you can’t get a bank loan any more. With the Alps looking decidedly more rocky and green than white and wintry in December, 2006, ski resorts were in a panic over the prospect of lost holiday business. Was it bum year or a sign of things to come? The banks are clearly betting on the latter, noting that global warming will affect lower elevations first, shortening the ski season and melting profits along with the snow.
The insurance industry agrees. Estimates on global warming-related damage costs (floods, fires, hurricanes, droughts, etc.) could top a half trillion dollars by 2050, according to a 2001 estimate by reinsurance giant Munich Re. That was before Hurricane Katrina, which all by itself cost more than $100 billion, or about 10 times the cost of most other big hurricanes. $500 billion may turn out to be low-ball figure.
While the money men tally up the financial tab, paleontologist Tim Flannery is focused on the environmental price. The prospects for low-elevation ski resort operators may be dismal, but for the golden toad of Costa Rica, global warming has been a killer. When higher temperatures forced the clouds shrouding the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve to new heights, the resulting lack of foggy humidity proved fatal for the amphibians. Puddles dried up before eggs could hatch, and within the space of a few years, the last golden toad croaked its lonely last. That was in 1987. It took another 10 years before scientists figured out what happened and bestowed the toad with dubious distinction of being the first documented case of modern climate change extinction. No one knows how many other species have faced the same fate, especially less charismatic species (the bugs, worms and other soil-toilers and supporting actors that keep an ecology going), but clearly it is a growing number. With rising sea levels threatening coastal areas from the arctic to the tropics, expect extinct towns, cities, islands and cultures to join the list.
Flannery opens with a family gathering: His mother, born during the Depression, beams at her brood of grandchildren. The kids will be mid-life by 2050, a date Flannery cites often. Should business-as-usual polluting continue, conditions then wouldn’t merely be bad, they would be irrecoverable -- with the future of civilization hanging in the balance. Since 70% of the people alive today will be alive in 2050, climate change isn’t an abstract calamity affecting anonymous strangers in some distant fuzzy future: This is our nightmare, and it has already begun. Indeed, Flannery ties the unfolding tragedy in Darfur with a global warming-induced chronic drought that has gripped the African Sahel for last 20 years. Nomad and farmer, Muslim and Christian, Arab and African have been forced to scratch a living from an increasingly barren and hostile landscape. Add politics, corruption, greed, and weapons to the mix and conditions are all too ripe for genocide.
As an expert in global extinctions, Flannery is in an unusually good position to compare the past to the future. Everything from the brightness of the sun, to wobbles in the earth’s rotation and its elliptical orbit, to disruptions in ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream, to giant oceanic burps of methane from frozen deposits called clathrates, have affected the planet’s climatological fate. The “long summer” of the last 10,000 years, which made agriculture possible, which in turn led to cities and civilization, is actually something of an anomaly. The question isn’t whether our good weather fortune will ultimately change, but when.
During the glacial maxima – between 35,000 and 20,000 years ago -- sea levels were 300 feet lower than they are today; and the parts of North America and Europe that weren’t buried under miles of ice were treeless subarctic deserts. It took 10,000 years – between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago – for the planet’s overall surface temperature to warm up 9 degrees Farenheit. That was the fastest rise in temperature in Earth’s history. Until now. If we continue to spew CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) at the rate we’re spewing, we could easily match, or even smash, that record in 1/100 the time.
As Flannery recounts, this is an abundance of bad news. Even the rare good news isn’t so good. Although higher CO2 levels generally increase the growth rates of plants, recent research has shown that plants exposed to high levels of CO2 are less nutritious. And an increase in global warming-induced droughts, floods, and wildfires, along with the loss of coastal regions to rising seas, would cut into crop totals. Meanwhile, diseases carried by mosquitoes and ticks, such as malaria, West Nile virus, chikunguya and Lyme Disease, would expand their ranges. At least until melting ice disrupted the Gulf Stream, triggering an ice age…
Then, of course, those ski resorts would be back in business.
Given such a dire consequences, Flannery clings to every thin thread of hope he can find, providing a “Climate Change Checklist” at the end of the book with 11 “actions” to reduce GHG emissions. Although it is hard to believe that installing energy efficient appliances, buying “green power” from utilities, and taking public transportation will get us much closer -- fast enough -- to the 70% reduction in GHGs needed to avert catastrophe, there is no alternative but to try.
- j.a.g.
