Bound to be Extreme: Books on Climate Change

by James Lovelock
Basic Books, New York, 2009
278 pp., Trade $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-465-01549-8.

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

by Mark Lynas
National Geographic, Washington, D.C., 2008
288 pp.,Trade $26.00
ISBN-10: 1426202131; ISBN-13: 978-1426202131.

The Bridge at the Edge of the World

by James Speth
Yale University Press , New Haven, CT, 2008
295 pp.,   Paper $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-300-15115-2.

Reviewed by George Gessert

For years the news from science about climate change, although never of one voice, has gone from bad to worse. To borrow a line from Lily Tomlin, no matter how pessimistic I get, I can't keep up. Take the most recent assessment report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example. Climate Change 2007 had barely been released when one of its most sobering predictions was overtaken by events. That summer the northern polar ice cap retreated as far as the report predicted would be likely - in 2030.

Climate Change 2007 consists of three volumes summarizing scientific findings on climate. Each volume is about a thousand pages long. Eight hundred contributing authors and 450 lead authors wrote the texts, which were reviewed by 2,500 scientists from 130 countries. Climate Change 2007 is widely considered the most authoritative summary of what is happening with Earth's climate and what is likely to happen over the next century. These volumes provide the scientific basis for international discussions about a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012.

The research that the IPCC gathered indicates that due largely to human activities, worldwide temperatures in the next century will rise somewhere between 1.4º to 5.8º Celsius (approximately 2º to 10º Fahrenheit.) What do a few degrees matter? A lot, if Earth's history is any indication. During the last ice age, average global temperatures were only about 6º C less than today. At the low end of the IPCC's predicted rise, we can expect an unabated wave of extinctions, severe storms, and widespread desertification. In the midrange, add in submersion of New York and other coastal cities, transformation of the Amazon rainforest into desert scrub, and world famines. At around 4º C tipping points are likely to take things out of human hands. At the upper end of the predictions, most of Earth, both land and sea, will become a biological desert.

The texts of Climate Change 2007 are technical and emotionless. Many of them reference complex computer models. Yet the volumes have a cheerful, user-friendly look. There are attractively colored maps, charts, and graphs, and tables with pleasant background tones. Section headings are in color. Apocalypse is in the air, but the visual presentation is pretty. The effect is a little schizophrenic.

Non-specialists will find the report dauntingly long and eye-glazingly detailed. A good distillation of Climate Change 2007 is Mark Lynas's Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet , which delivers the IPCC's message in clear, non-technical language. Each degree of temperature rise gets its own chapter, proceeding from low to high, and from familiar climate-related tragedies like Hurricane Katrina and the Australian drought to cascades of unfamiliar disasters. The book won the Royal Society Science Books Prize, Britain's most prestigious prize for science writing.

IPCC reports provide policy-makers with information necessary to develop responses to climate change. The reports also affect public discourse. Just how dramatically can be gauged by reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman, a prominent pundit and bellwether of received wisdom in the U.S. For many years Friedman has skillfully charted a course that follows the slightest shifts in the American political winds. For example, he supported the decision to invade Iraq, but parted ways with the Bush regime as it failed. Friedman does not have a reputation for concern about the environment, but in Hot, Flat and Crowded he repeats IPCC warnings and adds his voice to the swelling American chorus demanding that climate change be addressed. This requires new rhetoric, which he helps supply. Following Al Gore's model in An Inconvenient Truth , Friedman balances bad news with good: the shift to a green economy will free the U.S. of dependence on foreign oil, improve trade balances, and provide a wealth of opportunities for entrepreneurs. He waxes rhapsodic about America's can-do spirit and envisions the U.S. becoming the world's leader in clean technology. If the U.S. leads the way, even China will go green.

Capitalism, according to this faith, is less a cause of climate change than its cure. As with all faiths, arguments can be made. Friedman points out that massive government subsidies to fossil fuel industries - some 30 billion dollars in 2007 alone - and the practice of externalizing costs have long violated the spirit of capitalism. All that we have to do is overcome the fossil fuel lobby in Washington, eliminate market distortions, adequately fund clean energy research, and everything will turn out better than ever. Friedman's trust in capitalism is almost infectious. He sees some troubling signs, but rarely lingers on them. In his discussion of China, for example, he acknowledges that "catastrophe" there is possible. However, beyond mentioning air pollution and social unrest he says little about what this catastrophe might be.

The limitations of Friedman's approach are most evident in his failure to connect the dots between climate change and the full economic cycle. He recognizes that growth has contributed to climate change and therefore he advocates changes in how we achieve growth. However, he does not say what happens in recession. ( Hot, Flat and Crowded went to press in July, 2008, before today's recession hit full force, but he writes about the gathering storm.) In spite of the hardships that recession causes, everyone benefits in one way: decreased economic activity results in slowdown in greenhouse gas emissions. This, unlike existing kinds of growth, buys us a little time. If effective political solutions to emissions are not forthcoming, economic shrinkage will be our only hope (short of massive volcanic eruptions that spew cooling particulates into the atmosphere) for avoiding the worst effects of climate change. Obvious as this is, Friedman does not discuss it, probably because it indicates that the familiar economic order, except in decline, will destroy the natural systems that sustain it.

The IPCC reports accommodate responses like Friedman's. The problem lies less in the science than in the summaries. These occupy a few pages at the beginning of each volume, and are the only parts of the reports likely to be read by nonscientists, including pundits. Each of the 130 participating governments had veto power over the summaries. With veto power exercised by the Bush administration, and by states such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and India, all economically locked into production and consumption of fossil fuels on a massive scale, the summaries could not sound warnings that imply need for quick, far-reaching change. Because of this, it is safe to say that climate prospects may be considerably worse than the summaries indicate.

James Lovelock provides a less politicized perspective than the IPCC summaries. He has made many important contributions to science and has proven himself an exceptionally prescient thinker, but is best known for the Gaia hypothesis, which construes Earth as a largely self-regulating entity with characteristics of a super-organism. Lovelock has worked with NASA, universities, and the British government, but for the past several decades has maintained his independence from institutions. His interpretations of data relevant to climate, with some exceptions, do not serve the immediate interests of the global economic order. As a consequence, Lovelock has been relegated to the margins of acceptable public discourse in the United States. Friedman, for example, does not mention him.

In The Vanishing Face of Gaia , Lovelock minces no words: it is impossible to save the planet as we know it. He is convinced that we are moving swiftly toward a hot, desert world in which the only places suitable for agriculture will be near the poles, on favored islands, and at a few continental oases. "It is hubris to think that we know how to save the Earth," he writes. "Our planet looks after itself. All that we can do is try to save ourselves."

How can we do that? Dutifully Lovelock considers ways that humanity might still avoid the worst, surveying familiar and exotic remedies, from revival of nuclear power, to massive production of char, to fertilization of the oceans with trace nutrient iron. However, he does not think that technology is the key. We already have the technical means to save ourselves.

The problem, according to Lovelock, is lack of time, and the nature of human consciousness. Although we are capable of acquiring some understanding of Earth and the biosphere as they evolve over time, for the most part we live locally and immediately, not all that differently from other mammals. Our political and economic systems reflect our dominant modes of consciousness and are not geared for the long run. Furthermore, our population has far overshot Earth's capacity to sustain us. According to Lovelock, were the population of the Earth a hundred million we could live indefinitely like affluent Americans, but humans now approach seven billion, and more and more people are striving for and achieving American levels of consumption. "No voluntary human act ," Lovelock writes, "can reduce our numbers fast enough even to slow climate change." In interviews, he has predicted that by 2100 our population will be less than a billion. He does not say how he expects this to happen, but his silence suggests that he believes the process will be Malthusian.

In Lovelock's previous book, The Revenge of Gaia , (2005) he assured readers that at least we did not face extinction. Even under his worst-case scenarios, a few breeding pairs would survive. The central problem would be to preserve what he considered "essential knowledge", such as the table of elements, and the germ theory of disease.

In his more recent book he does not discuss preserving knowledge, and is less sure that our species will survive. If melting polar ice results in unconstrained exploitation of the vast stores of natural gas and oil that lie beneath the Arctic Ocean, Earth's temperature could be pushed well beyond the uppermost IPCC predictions, so high that not only will our species join the trilobites, so will all other forms of life except for a few thermophiles. Most of these are single-celled, and because of their adaptation to heat and chemically unusual environments, they will not have the capacity to moderate Earth's climate. Earth is too close to the sun to remain cool without the regulating effects of diverse, abundant, and complexly interconnected life, so temperatures will climb above the boiling point of water. The planet will remain searing hot until, after a billion years or so, it will be consumed by the sun.

Almost everyone today has glimpsed the abyss of extinction, but few have gazed into it as unflinchingly as Lovelock. Remarkably he does not despair of humankind. Even though our species is rapidly turning the planet into a desert, he believes that we still have a crucial creative role to play in Earth's future, and therefore it is imperative that we survive. In the final chapter of The Vanishing Face of Gaia , he makes a suggestion that is astonishing to hear from a scientist: to save ourselves and prepare for our next role in Earth's history, we should develop a new, Earth-based religion that situates humankind within the larger context of the biosphere and elevates Earth's well-being above our own.

Many Earth-based religions already exist, but Lovelock does not discuss them, perhaps because all are pre-scientific in their basic outlooks. Presumably he holds out hope for a religion rooted in science. However, this religion would not worship science or reason. Lovelock considers reason among the finest and most valuable of human capacities, but he recognizes that it does not meet the needs of most people most of the time. Emotion, intuition, and spontaneous action need to be validated and given form without opening the door to the depredations of the biosphere that Christianity and other anthropocentric religions and their secular descendants have allowed.

It is a sign of our times for a scientist of Lovelock's stature to say that we need to establish a new religion. Critics of The Vanishing Face of Gaia have called it a jeremiad and a rant. It is both, and at the same time it is heroic. Lovelock gathers the knowledge of a lifetime to transcend the bounds of scientific discourse and sound a warning about matters of the greatest urgency.

By articulating some of the most terrible possibilities that we face, Lovelock goes a long way toward breaking the spell of fear, numbness, and denial that climate change generates. Climate change is a profoundly emotional issue. We need to find ways to express the anger, despair, grief, and emptiness that come with knowledge of climate change. Only by engaging the emotional dimension of climate change can anyone decide with a clear mind what to do or not do. Extraordinary problems demand extraordinary responses. Our situation may even favor major cultural mutations. There is more energy and hope in Lovelock's unsparing honesty than in anything else I've read on climate.

With increasing confidence we know what may happen, but obviously no one, including Lovelock, knows exactly what will happen. As a species we have lived through major climate change before, but the last time was before the agricultural revolution. We cannot be sure how we will collectively respond this time around. We may have a greater capacity to look beyond individual concerns and immediate self-interest than Lovelock believes, or these may play out in unexpected ways.

James Speth, in The Bridge at the Edge of the World , considers a range of political and economic approaches which in theory could bring our high-flying economic and cultural order back to Earth without a cataclysmic crash. Speth, dean of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale, argues that climate is less a technological problem than a cultural, political, and economic one. He concurs with Friedman that the rhetoric of capitalism may be useful for legislating reforms to make markets reflect the true costs of energy. However, Speth considers this only a first step. He sees capitalism as a key part of our problem because capitalism is a system that cannot survive without expansion, and as production increases, natural systems, most of which are now in severe stress, pay a further price. Capitalism's reductive dynamic was of some use before our population numbered in the billions, and before we had developed ways to extensively exploit nonhuman nature. Those days are long gone. Capitalism is now on a trajectory toward overshoot and collapse.

The alternative is rapid development of some kind of steady state economy. Historically, most economic orders have been more-or-less steady state. In this respect, Speth suggests that we will become more like our ancestors. Whatever happens, we can be reasonably sure of this much: a century from now the human order will be well on its way to something as different from today as today is from medieval Europe, or even the Mayans.