William F. Ruddiman
PLOWS, PLAGUES, AND PETROLEUM
How humans took control of climate
202pp. Princeton University Press. $24.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley.
£15.95.
0 691 12164 8
Tim Flannery
THE WEATHER MAKERS
The history and future impact of climate change
341pp. Allen Lane. £20.
0 713 99921 7
US: Berkeley, CA: Atlantic Monthly Press. $24.
0 871 13935 9
James Lovelock
THE REVENGE OF GAIA
Why the Earth is fighting back – and how we can still save humanity
177pp. Allen Lane. £16.99.
0 713 99914 4
US: New York: Basic Books. $25. 0 465 04168 X
Stephan Harding
ANIMATE EARTH
Science, intuition and Gaia
256pp. Green Books. £10.95.
1 903998 75 1
US: White River Jct., VT: Chelsea Green. $25.
1 933392 29 0
Somewhere on my office floor lies a much-hurled copy of State of Fear (2005),
Michael Crichton’s swivel-eyed conspiracy thriller in which the “myth” of
global warming is exposed as an elaborate scientific fraud, perpetrated by
corrupt environmentalists as a means of prolonging their funding. The novel
itself is wonderfully inventive, not least in its appropriation of a
scholarly apparatus including footnotes, appendices and a fully annotated
bibliography; but even Crichton’s most dedicated readers must have been a
little taken aback when, in September 2005, he was called before the United
States Senate as an expert witness on climate change. According to James
Inhofe, the Republican Senator responsible for inviting him, global warming
remains “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”, a
sentiment endorsed by a number of the energy companies that funded Inhofe’s
election campaign, though – much to the Senator’s irritation – not by any of
the climate scientists whose work was examined at the hearing. Crichton,
however, was only too happy to endorse the Senator’s views, blithely
dismissing the “so-called” scientific consensus, and hinting that the
scientists in question might be acting from an awareness that their
continued funding depends on delivering the desired results.
Crichton’s characterization of mainstream scientists as a herd of compliant
sheep plodding after grant allocations has gone on to become a powerful
weapon in the climate sceptics’ armoury, and in spite of the overwhelming
evidence that human-enhanced climate change poses an imminent threat, the
atmosphere of mutual suspicion continues to grow, particularly in the US,
where anyone with something to contribute to the debate is assumed to have a
vested interest. Even William F. Ruddiman, the recently retired Professor of
Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and author of a
standard climate-science textbook, has felt it necessary to issue the
following disclaimer at the end of Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum, his
brilliantly provocative new account of the long history of climatic
variation:
I have never received any funding from either environmental or industry
sources. All of my career funding has been from the government, and over 99
percent of it from the National Science Foundation, which is widely regarded
by politicians of many views as the model of a well-run government funding
agency (based on its reliance on competition and peer review). All of the
funds used to write this book came from my retirement annuity earned at
educational institutions.
Ruddiman’s declaration stems from the wariness of someone who has seen his
ideas pressed into service on both sides of the climate-change divide. The
Ruddiman Hypothesis, as this latest work is beginning to be known, was first
developed some five years ago in a series of papers in specialist journals,
but it has been expanded into a book-length thesis in which a complex arena
of argument and analysis is presented with impressive clarity. Ruddiman’s
contention is that human activity has been influencing Earth’s climate not
merely for the past 200 years – a truth now (almost) universally
acknowledged – but for the past 8,000 years, due to the impact of major
innovations linked to the development of farming. From the Iron Age onwards,
northern China, large areas of Central and South America, and the fertile
crescent of the eastern Mediterranean suffered wholesale deforestation,
usually in the form of deliberate burning, followed by the introduction of
irrigation agriculture: activities which, even then, served to jettison
millions of tons of carbon and methane into the Earth’s fragile atmosphere.
“Before we built cities, before we invented writing, and before we founded
the major religions”, writes Ruddiman, “we were already altering climate. We
were farming.”
Ruddiman is well aware that the thought of early pastoral communities living
just as unharmoniously with the natural world as we do today goes against
some of our most cherished beliefs, but nevertheless, the evidence is there.
Slash-and-burn land clearance began in earnest some 8,000 years ago, and by
1000 bc, according to Ruddiman, most of China’s vast forests had gone, as
had those of India, southern and western Europe, North Africa, the
Mediterranean, the lowlands of Central America, and the highlands
surrounding the Peruvian Andes. Ruddiman calculates that those 5,000 years
of relentless clearance released something in the order of 200 billion tons
of carbon into the atmosphere – a quantity comparable with the estimated 300
billion tons that have been released since the start of the Industrial
Revolution. Large-scale irrigation, meanwhile, spread across South-east Asia
to China, where vast artificial wetlands were created for the cultivation of
new strains of rice. Flooded ricefields are now a feature of every continent
except Antarctica, but the methagenic microbes which thrive in such
oxygen-poor environments have turned them into one of the planet’s principal
polluters, sending huge volumes of methane (a greenhouse gas at least twenty
times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide) into the
increasingly anthropogenic atmosphere.
The really startling part of Ruddiman’s analysis comes when he looks at what
happens to the climate whenever human activity is curtailed. Mysterious
oscillations in the carbon signal over the past 2,000 years sent him “into
the history books”, where he discovered that the steepest declines in the
CO² record all occurred immediately after major plague pandemics, when
population crashes saw significant areas of abandoned farmland revert back
to new forest cover. The near-global Justinian Plague of 540–42 ad, for
example, which killed an estimated 40 per cent of the populations of Europe
and the Middle East, was followed by the first extended CO² minimum that
appears in the recent ice-core record, while the subsequent plague-free
interval from the 740s to the mid-1300s “correlates reasonably well with the
rebound of the CO² trend”. Similarly, the Black Death of the late 1340s,
which swept away at least a third of the European population, was followed
by another sudden CO² decline that almost certainly played a part in the
Little Ice Age, a 600-year cooling phase that began in the thirteenth
century, and which ended with the introduction of modern coal-fired
technology. If the Ruddiman Hypothesis is correct, it will add an entirely
new dimension to our understanding of climate change, since it shows that
rampant human activity has been capable not only of warming our world, but
of cooling it down when it stops. The implications for action today could
not be any clearer, though William Ruddiman, being firmly of the view that
science and politics do not mix, is not one to issue calls for a
decarbonized economy.
Tim Flannery, however, certainly is, and every chapter of The Weather Makers,
his powerful and convincing summary of just about everything we know about
climate science, constitutes an eloquent plea for a global consensus on
reducing CO² emissions by a great deal more than the paltry 5.2 per cent (by
2012) agreed under the Kyoto Protocol. Like Ruddiman (whose hypothesis he
welcomes), Flannery argues that past events hold the key to understanding
present choices, and he reminds us that the political will to avert
environmental catastrophe has been successfully activated before. Remember
the hole in the ozone layer? During the 1970s, researchers discovered that
ozone concentrations above Antarctica were thinning out with disturbing
rapidity, and that consequently the level of ultraviolet (UV) radiation
reaching the poles was increasing at an unprecedented rate. “The Earth’s
sunscreen”, as Flannery describes the ozone layer, was disappearing fast,
though it wasn’t long before the anthropogenic culprit had been nailed.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had been invented by industrial chemists in the
late 1920s, and their low cost and remarkable stability soon saw them put to
use in an array of applications, including refrigerators, air conditioners,
solvents and propellants. By 1975, spray cans alone were pumping half a
billion tonnes of them into the atmosphere, and by 1985, worldwide
production of CFCs stood at almost 2 billion tonnes per year. But as climate
scientists were beginning to discover, the problem with these artificial
compounds is that once they have evaporated into the stratosphere, they are
soon broken down by UV radiation, and their chlorine atoms released. Since a
single chlorine atom can destroy up to 100,000 ozone molecules, even over
the Earth’s mid-latitudes, it was becoming apparent that the hole over
Antarctica was merely the initial rend in our planet’s protecting veil.
In 1978, the US Government took the lead by outlawing the use of CFCs in spray
cans. Three years later, the United Nations Environment Program proposed the
creation of a global convention guaranteeing the protection of the ozone
layer, which led to the signing, in 1987, of the Montreal Protocol, “a
signal moment in human societal development”, as Flannery describes it, “for
it represents the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution
problem”. Compared with the ongoing Kyoto fiasco, the Montreal agreement was
a model of swift international action, with every developed nation in the
world – including the current Kyoto rebels, Australia and the United States
– willingly committing themselves to the total elimination of CFCs from all
industrial processes by 1996. Ten years on from the Montreal deadline, the
ozone hole has already reduced by an estimated 20 per cent and is on course
to have entirely refilled by the middle of the twenty-first century.
So why, given such a powerful precedent, is there still so much foot-dragging
when it comes to limiting greenhouse gas emissions? Under the terms of the
Kyoto Protocol, which was drawn up in December 1997 (though it only actually
came into force in February 2005, having been delayed by the antics of
Iceland and Russia), the signatory nations are obliged to enact only the
most superficial of measures to achieve their agreed reduction targets, yet
most of them are on a steady course to fail. Even Denmark, which Flannery
praises as “the home of the modern wind industry” (21 per cent of Danish
electricity is now sourced from wind turbines), has proven unable to curb
its rising CO² emissions, and will only meet its Kyoto commitment by
spending more than a billion dollars on carbon credits bought from Eastern
Europe.
Flannery’s impatience with the carbon-credit system, an economic card trick
which does nothing to actually bring down emissions, flares into anger when
he considers the “self-interested” conduct of his own country, Australia –
the world’s highest per-capita greenhouse emitter – which not only refused
to ratify the Kyoto agreement, but also managed to negotiate a carbon
allocation 8 per cent higher than its 1990 emissions, a “special deal”
trumped only by the concessions granted to Iceland (a nation now free to
increase its carbon emissions by a whopping 10 per cent). “If you’re
confused by this, don’t worry”, writes Flannery; “so is the rest of the
world.”
But we should worry, because if the developed nations are struggling to meet
even the preposterously lenient targets agreed under the terms of the Kyoto
Protocol, how are they going to manage the 60–70 per cent reductions (by
2050) that many, including Flannery, consider necessary for the
stabilization of the climate? “Action is needed now”, he urges, “but there
is no need to wait for government to act. You can do it yourself” – and he
goes on to outline the benefits of the now familiar checklist of
emissions-limiting actions that every household can make, “none of which
requires serious sacrifices”: change your electricity supplier, install a
solar panel, switch to low-energy light bulbs, turn off appliances, walk
whenever possible. Performed in their millions, even the smallest individual
actions can contribute enormously to the Kyoto reductions, but, as in Al
Gore’s list of “10 Things To Do” which appears at the end of his recent
book, An Inconvenient Truth – “use less hot water”; “check your tires”;
“plant a tree” – the rhetorical mismatch of scale between grim apocalyptic
warnings and cheerfully mundane solutions can make the problem appear more,
rather than less, overwhelming. Will half-filling our kettles really have an
impact on a climate regime that is already committed to several degrees of
future warming, regardless of any measures we might put in place today?
Isn’t it all too little, too late, and instead of making minor adjustments
to the workload of the national grid, shouldn’t we be preparing to adapt to
the worsening climate ahead?
James Lovelock certainly seems to think so, and the forecast with which he
ends his passionate, if confusing, polemic, The Revenge of Gaia, is for a
climate “that could easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only
a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive”. Perhaps
surprisingly for someone who describes himself as green, Lovelock has little
of Flannery’s faith in the benefits of renewable energy, and none at all in
wind power, which “through crude and unsustainable industrial development,
is already devastating some unusually beautiful countryside”. Lovelock
estimates that some 276,000 wind generators would be needed to supply
Britain’s current electricity needs, a prospect that seems to fill him with
horror, though I must admit that I found the figure surprisingly low, since,
even excluding all built-up areas (along with national parks), it works out
at less than three turbines per square mile. But as Lovelock points out, the
wind doesn’t blow with any consistency, and, even in Denmark, turbines
require high levels of backup from the national grid. His solution, which
has not endeared him to environmentalists, for whom (up to now) he had been
an inspirational figure, is a new generation of nuclear reactors: fission to
begin with, since it is all we have, but with the holy grail of fusion
energy firmly in mind. “We have no time now to experiment with visionary
energy sources”, he writes: “civilization is in imminent danger and has to
use nuclear energy now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our
outraged planet”.
As far as the radioactive legacy is concerned, he remains curiously unmoved,
arguing that the waste produced by fossil-fuel energy has proven far more
dangerous and difficult to dispose of than anything produced by a reactor.
He even offers to take delivery of a year’s worth of nuclear waste for
burial in his own back garden, using the heat from its decaying radioactive
elements to warm his home for free. As he points out, “it would be a waste
not to use it”. Readers of James Lovelock’s first book, Gaia (1979), will
already be familiar with his faith in the technological fix, since it was in
its pages that he advocated the wholesale release of CFCs into the
atmosphere as a means of averting the imminent ice age, going out of his way
to condemn the US’s aerosol ban as an example of “bad science”. Although he
now concedes that he was woefully mistaken, he retains his fondness for such
sci-fi solutions, and The Revenge of Gaia is full of proposed “macro
engineering options” for the amelioration of climate change, including the
positioning of giant silver sunshades between the Earth and the Sun, the
artificial production of marine stratus clouds across a wide area of open
sea, and, in a formulation bearing an uncanny resemblance to his earlier
CFCs idea, the release of vast sulphurous contrails into the stratosphere as
a means of simulating the cooling effect of major volcanic eruptions.
In contrast to Flannery’s scaled-down solutions, which at least offer the
means of achieving immediate reductions, Lovelock’s leaps of technological
faith appear to be taking him ever further from the deep ecology that
influenced the development of his Gaia hypothesis, a new way of
understanding Planet Earth as a single, self-regulating system comprised of
physical, biological and human components. Although the hypothesis has not
been promoted to the status of a recognized scientific theory (as Lovelock
now claims), most earth scientists are broadly in agreement with the main
contention of the Gaia idea, though few would ever be caught using
Lovelock’s term, being understandably wary of its mythical connotations.
Lovelock, however, insists on the need to personalize “the living Earth”,
arguing that “metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread
comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the
lethal dangers that lie ahead”. Yet too much imagery can overwhelm an
argument, and there are passages in The Revenge of Gaia where the sheer
preponderance of metaphor and simile threaten to overburden what is, after
all, an easily grasped proposition: that we are running out of time to do
something serious about climate change.
Lovelock ends his book with the thought that it may well be too late to avert
“a global decline into a chaotic world ruled by brutal warlords on a
devastated Earth”, and he urges us to “listen to the deep ecologists” and
let them guide us over the new terrain. He particularly recommends the work
of the ecologist Stephan Harding, who, in Animate Earth, describes his
attempts to establish a healing, intuitive, “holistic” relationship with our
visibly suffering planet. I tried very hard to like Harding’s book, much of
which is written with passion and insight, but I was unimpressed by its
facile dismissal of our entire Western scientific culture as “a soulless
world of bare facts devoid of inherent meaning”, as well as by its equally
facile endorsement of the ecological purity of “traditional” non-Western
cultures, a virtuous realm – according to Harding – of “intuitive
perception”, in which “nature is truly alive, and every entity within it is
endowed with agency, intelligence, and wisdom”. Even Lovelock draws the line
at such essentialist banalities, pointing out that Australian aboriginals,
“often claimed to be an example of natural humans at peace with the earth”,
were responsible for the slash-and-burn clearance of much of their
continent, while William Ruddiman’s description of the systematic hunting to
extinction of Australian (and North American) wildlife, which was well under
way at least 5,000 years ago, leaves little room for comforting myths about
a lost Edenic past.
Harding, is right, however, to look towards the only future available to
humanity, one in which new ways of living cooperatively with the Earth will
have been found. It would be an achievement unprecedented in the whole of
human history, and, as Tim Flannery reminds us in the closing pages of his
book, ours is the generation fated to begin to take responsibility, “for we
are now the weather makers, and the future of biodiversity and civilisation
hangs on our actions”.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Hamblyn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Water, Culture and
Society Project at the University of Nottingham, and the author of The
Invention of Clouds, which won the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
