The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
List Price: $24.00 Our Price: $1.69 You Save: $22.31 (93%)
Product Description
Sometime this century the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all other natural factors. Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Niño ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in two hundred years, the hottest European summer on record, and one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced in Florida. With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to extinction by the levels of greenhouse gases that will accumulate in the next few decades, we are reaching a global climatic tipping point. The Weather Makers is both an urgent warning and a call to arms, outlining the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do to prevent a cataclysmic future. Along with a riveting history of climate change, Tim Flannery offers specific suggestions for action for both lawmakers and individuals, from investing in renewable power sources like wind, solar, and geothermal energy, to offering an action plan with steps each and every one of us can take right now to reduce deadly CO2 emissions by as much as 70 percent.
Spotlight Customer Reviews:
Summary:
Very interesting book
|
Comment:
I found it very interesting, is not a science book...I think this book is perfect if somebody wants to know anything about the climate change
|
Summary:
Even with some failures, this is one important book
|
Comment:
Tim Flannery, well-known for his writing on the unique ecology of Australia, turns his attention to the pressing issue of global warming with "The Weather Makers". As the disappearance of the southern winter rain belt hit home in 2006, Flannery deservedly won an Australian of the Year award for exposing the continent's shameful record on greenhouse gas emissions.
"The Weather Makers" begins in a quite slow fashion with a look at past climate changes and how they have occurred. Flannery, in a very scientific manner, gives a very detailed account of how the Earth's climate evolved, and how scientists gradually found out the role of carbon dioxide in making the Earth habitable by increasing temperatures. He looks at these things in quite revealing detail and the goes on a journey through geological and human history to illustrate how humanity developed in an era dominated by long periods of very cold weather in which most of the unusually fertile land of Europe, North America and New Zealand was covered by glaciers. Flannery then looks, in very close detail, at how coal and oil were formed and shows, in remarkably simple and legible language, how fossil fuels form and explains why they are so rare in comparison with the present demadn for them. He also shows, in quite simple language, how they burn and why they vary so much in their usefulness as fuels.
It is the last half or so of "The Weather Makers" that is really revealing and something that must be read by global warming sceptics and especially by those who are in doubt or overtly nervous about action. Flannery shows, contrary to popular belief, that climate moves as carbon dioxide increases from one metastable state to another, and that the changes - like the 40 percent drop in Melbourne rainfall in October 1996 - are quite abrupt and, as we are seeing in Australia today - extremely liable to be disastrous. his illustration of the declines in rainfall over southwestern Australia are especially noteworthy. Flannery also does a marvellous job of showing how species, especially in tropical mountains that are effectively cool "islands", global warming has already driven extremely old species like the golden toad to extinction through chaning the level of the cloud layer. The very fact that such species have become extinct should, of itself, be enough to quash notions - still popular amongst the most fertile sections of modern humanity - that global wamring is not real.
Flannery also writes an excellent section titled "The Great Stumpy Reef" about threats to the Great Barrier Reef from global warming and coral bleaching.
The last part of the book, which looks at the Kyoto Protocol, is however clearly the weakest part of the book. Whilst I do not question Flannery's point that there are a large number of vested interests controlling politics in Australia and the US that prevent public ratification of the Kyoto Protocol regardless of its ineffectiveness, I am still critical of Flannery for his failure to recognise that - contrary to conventional wisdom - Australia and the Republican states of the US do not belong to the same culture as the rest of the West. Rather, they retain a value system that disappeared from Europe a hundred years ago and from Blue America, Canada and New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s. I myself have no doubts that Australia would not refuse to take the most radicla action on greenhouse emissions like eliminating car travel and coal power were it not for a rapidly growing and socially ultraconservative bloc of voters become the dominant force in its politics. Flannery, in contrast, never looks at public opinion in Australia beyond the stereotyped liberal view that the public is less conservative than government.
The rise of parties like One Nation and Family First in Australia, and the number of conservative, climate-sceptic sites on the web form the US, should be proof that public opinion is actually more conservative than Flannery would like to believe. He also does not consider the serious question of what an increasing ultraconservative Australian public will think when rainfall declines in Melbourne and Perth become even worse than they have already.
He also does not look at whether international bodies' failure the greater ecological vulnerability of Australia (which he ought more than anyone to have known about) idea of assuming equal reductions for all countries as the right way to reduce emissions radically wrong. I myself believe Australia should have been internationally targetted long before any efforts at dealing with any other nation's emissions were even considered.
Nonetheless, for all Flannery's failures on the cultural front, "The Weather Makers" is still a most impressive read packed with infomration to arm yourself against the climate change sceptics and to harden your views if you are in doubt.
|
Summary:
The world of the racoon is coming
|
Comment:
A few weeks ago, while visiting South Australia's Yorke Peninsula (the place where European settlers have cut the native mulga forest to plant wheat and barley... and later discovered that it does not always rain enough to grow wheat and barley), I stopped by a local public library looking for an interesting Australia book. As my luck had it, I picked two, from the same shelf: Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers", and Tim Low's "Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia's Exotic Invaders". It turned out that these two books - both well written, well informed, and covering environmental subject of concerns to Australians as well as people worldwide - complement each other in some ways that neither author may have planned.
The heart of Flannery's book is a martyrology of species that have already gone extinct due to the climate change now in progress, or those likely to do so as the climate change (warming, reduction in precipitation, fog, or cloud cover) continues. As a biologist closely working with many rare and endangered species, and, on occasion, having a chance to discover a tree kangaroo species just to see it become extinct within a few years, Dr. Flannery no doubt is in a very good position to appreciate the danger brought by climate change to many plant and animal species, as well as the tragedy of their loss to the mankind.
As Tim Flannery's accessible and well-presented analysis of many extinction (or threatened extinction) cases shows, the extinct or doomed species are mostly those that are already on their last legs, due to the natural or human-induced causes. Some of them have lost most of their habitat during the last ice age, others during the warming that followed the ice age; some were extirpated from many areas when the Aborigines came to Australia with the spear and the firestick, others were helped to their grave by Anglo-Australians' bulldozers and ploughshares. As Flannery correctly emphasizes, it is the reduction and segmentation of suitable habitats that makes many plant and animal species especially vulnerable to climate change, as, with the wheat fields and housing estates in the way, they can't easily "move" from the northern to southern parts of their geographic province anymore.
Although that's probably not Flannery's conclusion, it seems to me that in many cases the impending loss of these species, while tragic for the world's genetic diversity, and for those small areas where these species do find the refuge now, their extinction won't affect the ecosystems as they currently exist throughout most of the world: there, these threatened species have already disappeared.
As the global temperature inexorably rises, what is coming to replace the doomed species and the ecosystems that they form? As Flannery suggest, many areas of the world are on the way to simplification or "uniformization" of sorts: the reindeer's and lemming's tundra may be replaced by the expansion of the moose's and squirrel's taiga forest; the polar bear's ice-covered Arctic ocean - with a seasonally ice free cold sea (similar to today's Bering Sea perhaps?); Amazonian rainforest, with a savanna of sorts. And to get a better idea of who *is* likely to survive in the new hotter world, Tim Low's "Feral Future" makes a good companion reader. It is all about creatures whose habitat, instead of shrinking (often, due to human activity), expands (often, not without human help). Widely adaptable, these species are likely to survive in the changing world, and likely even to benefit from the change sometimes, replacing the species that are losing ground. Forests of lantana and mimosa instead of the native species; rats and racoons instead of tree cangaroos; starlings and mynas instead of the native birds... this is what we are likely to see more and more, with or without climate change.
Read the two books together and think of what the future may hold. It may not be all that unpleasant - if, after some millenia, the climate stabilizes again, the now-worldwide starlings or racoons may undergo a new wave of speciation, developing new narrow-ecologic-niche species, replacing those that are disappearing now. It's probably not the first time this happens, on the geological scale: there must have been other global extinction events, followed by the appearance of new narrow-niche species, descending from the adaptable wide-nice survivors.
But in the present day, perhaps though the conservation biologists could pressure governments into funding captive breeding programs, to save some of the particularly threatened species for later reintroduction in the suitable environments - wherever those may be. Maybe we should be prepared to grow a new Great Barrier Reef around Tasmania, too :-)
|
Summary:
Great Read...
|
Comment:
This was a wonderful read for me during a week I spend in the woods on retreat. Although not as "spiritual" as I would have expected, it still resonated with so much of my being in the wilderness. Contrary to Dr. May, I have spend numberous years with such times. I just thoroughly enjoyed his writing style, his honesty and humor, and the awareness that this was his last book before his death. I cried at the end of it!
|
Summary:
Great Over-all Look at Global Warming
|
Comment:
The Weather Makers is a great over-all, general look at global warming and climate change. Easily 5 stars, the highest rating, for its reasoned, common-sense guide to a complex subject, which largely avoids partisan politics and alarmist reactions. Of more than 30 books I've read on the subject, this is in the top three, the other two being "With Speed and Violence - Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change" by Fred Pearce; and "Hell and High Water - Global Warming, the Solution and the Politics, and What We Should Do" by Joseph Romm.
|
|