I’ve just about finished reading a great new book on climate change by Australian thinker and university professor Clive Hamilton. The book, Requiem For A Species, is an interesting but disconcerting read.

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The starting point is an admission that (as many climate change activists know) our goose is well and truly cooked. Hamilton reviews the now conclusive science that we will experience up to four degrees of warming this century – on our way there we will cross several major tipping points (such as an ice-free Arctic, and loss of much of the Amazon Basin through drought and fire) that will produce positive feedback and accelerate global warming.

The main focus of the book is why our civilisation can’t accept the scientific evidence that major warming-induced changes have already occurred, and that such changes are at or above the worst case IPCC scenario from the 2007 report. He blames our consumerist society for much of the problem, and goes to some length to explain why green is the new red (from the conservative’s point of view).

He discusses what a +4 degree world could be like, and ends with some ideas about what we can still do to mitigate the most extreme manifestations of climate instability.

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An inside tour of the incredible—and probably dangerous—plans to counteract the effects of climate change through experiments that range from the plausible to the fantastic

David Battisti had arrived in Cambridge expecting a bloodbath. So had many of the other scientists who had joined him for an invitation-only workshop on climate science in 2007, with geoengineering at the top of the agenda. We can’t take deliberately altering the atmosphere seriously, he thought, because there’s no way we’ll ever know enough to control it. But by the second day, with bad climate news piling on bad climate news, he was having second thoughts. When the scientists voted in a straw poll on whether to support geoengineering research, Battisti, filled with fear about the future, voted in favor.

While the pernicious effects of global warming are clear, efforts to reduce the carbon emissions that cause it have fallen far short of what’s needed. Some scientists have started exploring more direct and radical ways to cool the planet, such as:

Schemes that were science fiction just a few years ago have become earnest plans being studied by alarmed scientists, determined to avoid a climate catastrophe. In Hack the Planet, Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch looks more closely at this array of ideas and characters, asking if these risky schemes will work, and just how geoengineering is changing the world.

Scientists are developing geoengineering techniques for worst-case scenarios. But what would those desperate times look like? Kintisch outlines four circumstances: collapsing ice sheets, megadroughts, a catastrophic methane release, and slowing of the global ocean conveyor belt.

As incredible and outlandish as many of these plans may seem, could they soon become our only hope for avoiding calamity? Or will the plans of brilliant and well-intentioned scientists cause unforeseeable disasters as they play out in the real world? And does the advent of geoengineering mean that humanity has failed in its role as steward of the planet—or taken on a new responsibility? Kintisch lays out the possibilities and dangers of geoengineering in a time of planetary tipping points. His investigation is required reading as the debate over global warming shifts to whether humanity should Hack the Planet.

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The Worldwatch Institute has released their latest annual report on the health of the environment. From the highlights page:

Emissions and Warming

• According to the latest IPCC report, warming by 2100 is projected to be in the range of 1.1-6.4 degrees Celsius above the average in the 1980-99 period. Unabated, current increasing trends in emissions can be expected to raise Earth’s temperature by 4-6 degrees Celsius above today’s levels, if not more, by the end of this century. (pp. 13-14)
• A recent assessment indicates that a significant number of “tipping points”-thresholds beyond which it would become difficult-to-impossible to reverse changes in the climate system-could be approached if the planet warms more than 3 degree Celsius over the preindustrial level. However, a number of tipping points-including loss of the Greenland ice sheet-could be approached at warming levels over 1.5-2 degrees Celsius. (p. 17)
• The findings of the latest IPCC assessment and more-recent studies strongly reinforce the conclusion that “safe” levels of warming lie at 2 degrees Celsius or below. (p. 19)
• Once greenhouse gas concentrations are stabilized, global mean temperature will continue to rise due to momentum in the climate system for several decades, but it will very likely also begin to stabilize after several decades. (p. 23)
• Half of the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted today is expected to remain in the atmosphere a century from now, and much will remain even 10,000 years in the future. (pp. 23-24)
• Recent research has demonstrated that it is technically and economically feasible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast enough so that their atmospheric concentrations can be limited to around 400 parts per millon of CO₂-equivalent, or to lower in the longer term. (p. 25)

There is plenty more on the highlights page. Worth a quick look.

New Worldwatch Report

James Lovelock’s latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
has an important message. In a few years, or a few decades at most, abrupt changes in Earth’s climate will begin, which will end up killing almost all of us and cause the extinction of almost all life on Earth. The tropics and subtropics will be rendered uninhabitable by this shift, and the few survivors will cling to favoured regions such as Britain and New Zealand. Lovelock believes there is little we can do to avert our fate, for the causes of the climatic shift are now so entrenched that they are in all likelihood irreversible. In his view the best we can hope for is personal survival in a world of warring nations or, if we are particularly unfortunate, a world ruled by warlords.

Read the full book review here.