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Not quite convinced

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Fixing Climate, by Robert Kunzig and Wallace Broecker (Sort of Books, 2008) Fixing Climate is an urgent book. It argues that humans are largely responsible for the recent climate change, and that that change poses new and great dangers: drought round the world, and hugely raised sea levels (as much as sixteen feet) caused by the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Two things are special about this book. The first is the case it makes for `abrupt climate change' - a swing from (say) temperate to tundra, from mild to freezing, occurring in a few centuries or less. The second is that the authors maintain that attempts to regulate, control, and restrict man-made CO2 are doomed to failure. They look carefully at the options (including Kyoto, and the `carbon pie' of Pacala and Socolow) and dismiss almost all of them. The only hope that the authors can see is to take carbon directly out of the atmosphere, using free-standing scrubbers, spread around the planet, to cleanse all our air. But to counteract the CO2 we produce each year would take 80 million such collectors - and they see major difficulties in disposing of the CO2 that these collectors would extract. Putting it back into the ground is expensive, laborious, and enormously ugly. So this isn't an easy book: it is urgent, questioning - and worried. But is it convincing? Well, to me at least, not entirely. There are a number of areas where their facts are either contentious or simply wrong. (All the points below are drawn from published literature, in many cases IPCC publications, or from referenced websites.) 1. The thrust of the book is about `tipping points' - the unpredictability of `the climate beast'. But other respected `climate warners' - Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change , or Paul Hardaker, Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society - argue that `the idea of a point of no return, a "tipping point", is a misleading way to think about climate'. 2. `climate change is the most likely cause for an increase in forest fires' (p.117). The average acreage burned by forest fires has dropped by almost 90% since its peak in the 1930s (US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service). 3. `computer models reproduce well the observed spatial model' (p.158). They don't: `none of the models used by the IPCC ... corresponds even remotely to the current observed climate' - Dr Kevin Trenberth, principal author of the scientific section of the 2007 IPCC report. 4. `the Arctic has not been ice free in summer for a million years' . This is completely wrong. Arctic temperatures were higher in the 1930s than they are today (Climate Research Centre, UEA), and when The New York Times published a piece on unexpected free water at the North Pole, it had to publish an apology: `open water at the Pole is not unprecedented in summer' (NYT, August 29, 2000). 5. `perhaps the most dramatic example of global warming's impact on animals has been the plight of the polar bears, which hunt seals from sea ice in the Arctic' (p.160). Polar bears - which, as Kunzig and Broecker themselves point out in a different place (p. 169), have withstood far warmer Arctic temperatures during the past 125,000 years - are often cited as victims of global warming. In fact the threat to bears is human, in the form of hunting. The World Wildlife Fund report of 2002, oddly entitled Polar Bears at Risk, shows that polar bear populations are NOT declining. 6. `the World Health Organisation has estimated that global warming is already causing as many as 150,000 excess deaths a year' (p.161). The IPCC predicts `Reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure' (November 2007 Synthesis Report, table 3.2). 7. `it stands to reason that global warming will increase hurricanes' (p.162). Studies show that average windspeeds have decreased and the average number of hurricanes hitting the United States has dropped by 23% over the 20th century. 8. The book has a chapter called `Megadroughts', particularly aimed at the American Southwest. The Southwest is indeed a dry area - even if the residents insist on living as if it wasn't. But the book does not mention that over the 20th century, 8% of the United States has grown drier - and 25% has grown wetter. 9. The book cites Tuvalu, in the Pacific, as an example of `an island nation ... already sinking beneath the waves' (p. 168). Tuvalu is not sinking beneath the waves. All studies show that sea levels in that part of the Pacific are falling. So this is certainly an urgent and passionate book. But the authors rightly point out that `urgent as it is, global warming is not the most urgent problem for most of humanity; human misery is'. I would agree with that, and would add `animal misery' to that list. So we should only make a full-on attack on global warming if we are sure - very sure - that it is a real and present danger; because the huge sums required to tackle it can only be found by diverting them from other very good causes - providing clean water, preserving rain forests, building schools, combating malaria, protecting endangered species, ending factory farming. This book makes a good case for the magnitude of the danger. But in my view it doesn't make the case for the probability of the danger. The sense of the book is of someone very tightly enclosed in his own world. At one point Kunzig remarks that `There is no computer in [Broecker's] office' (p.149). One can't help feeling that it would have been a better book if the office had contained one!

Brilliant	Customer Rating:
An excellant book. A well written and well paced overview of climate change: from ice ages through to the modern era.

Science book of the year?

Customer Rating:

This really is an outstanding book - or, perhaps, two outstanding books. The first half is essentially the (surprisingly compelling) story of climate science, told in parallel with the remarkable career of Wally Broecker. Its author, Robert Kunzig, wrote one of the great popular science books - Mapping the Deep: The Story of Ocean Science - and has that brilliant knack of slipping difficult science into a familiar, human narrative, so you "get it" without realising you're being challenged. But it's the second half which is, literally, thrilling, as Kunzig and Broecker outline their vision of CO2 as a "fixable problem", just as the disposal of sewage was a century ago. Their fix is a radical invention by physicist Klaus Lackner (who sounds a genius) which will allow CO2 to be removed from the air by millions of car-sized "carbon scrubbers" and then sequestered in deep ocean or oil wells, or in basalt schists in Iceland. This is a book that offers hope to the climate crisis. Not that the authors for a second make light of its seriousness: quite the reverse. But they feel that not enough will be done to reduce emissions until it's too late. Unless the Lackner machines can come to our rescue. An absolutely vital book, and beautifully written. Science book of the year, in my opinion.

Facts and honesty, with a light at the end of the tunnel...

Customer Rating:

I read Fixing Climate in around a day and a half as I was transfixed, -it's phenomenal. Firstly, I never thought I would enjoy a 'science' book, let alone one about climate change as everyone is banging on about it, but I found it fascinating. It has a brutal honesty. There is no spin, no opinion, just facts and history, who can argue with that? It has however made me wonder if turning all the lights off (and my monitor) at night will make a difference to this colossal problem that we face, I think governments are the place where change can happen. I think above all it's wonderfully written with a warm humour which makes it even more enjoyable. If you read one book on the environment - make it this one.