The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

By Tim Flannery

The #1 international bestseller on climate change that’s been endorsed by policy makers, scientists, writers, and energy executives around the world.
 
Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers contributed in bringing the topic of global warming to worldwide prominence. For the first time, a scientist provided an accessible and comprehensive account of the history, current status, and future impact of climate change, writing what has been acclaimed by reviewers everywhere as the definitive book on global warming.
 
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.
 
Originally somewhat of a global warming skeptic, Tim Flannery spent several years researching the topic and offers a connect-the-dots approach for a reading public who has received patchy or misleading information on the subject. Pulling on his expertise as a scientist to discuss climate change from a historical perspective, Flannery also explains how climate change is interconnected across the planet.
 
This edition includes a new afterword by the author.
 
“An authoritative, scientifically accurate book on global warming that sparkles with life, clarity, and intelligence.” —The Washington Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781555846336

Tim Flannery

Professor TIM FLANNERY is a leading writer on climate change. A Scientist, an explorer and a conservationist, Flannery has held various academic positions including Professor at the University of Adelaide, Director of the South Australian Museum and Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum. A frequent presenter on ABC Radio, NPR and the BBC, he has also written and presented several series on the Documentary Channel. His books include Here on Earth and the international number one bestseller The Weather Makers. Flannery was named Australian of the Year in 2007.

Book preview

More Praise for The Weather Makers:

"With The Weather Makers, Tim Flannery, himself a creative scientist, adds a blend of poetical writing and historical perspective to an amazingly clear and comprehensive tour of the complex climate-change world. He starts in early Earth history and brings us to the present predicament—and names names of who is primarily responsible—us, especially via careless management, crass consumerism, corporate greed, political corruption and media indifference. This is a beautifully written guide for anyone interested in the increasingly serious climate-change problem to learn what is going on."

—Stephen H. Schneider, Professor, Department of Biological Sciences

at Stanford University and Co-Director of the Center for Environmental

Science and Policy at the Stanford Institute for International Studies

This is the book the world has been waiting for—and needing—for decades. At last, a book that sets out, for the general public, the irrefutable evidence that climate change is already happening, and we need to become very serious about it—fast.

—Professor Peter Singer, internationally renowned author and ethicist

"An overwhelming account of how climate change is affecting the world today. Presented with a vast array of information in a readable and convincing way, The Weather Makers shows clearly that decisive action is needed now."

—Chief Emeka Anyaoku, President, World Wildlife Fund International

"Until The Weather Makers, nobody since Bill McKibben had told the tale of what this global-warming beast will be like as it awakens. Super hurricanes are understood as omens as Flannery weaves the science, politics, and the economics together in a tale as frightening as it must have been when Hitler was marching across Europe. When he writes, ‘there has been little reason for our blindness, except perhaps for an unwillingness to look such horror in the face and say, You are my creation,’ I believe he will inspire us to destroy this creation before it destroys us."

—John Passacantando, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA

We have to shift the debate on global warming this year and this book is going to help make that happen.

—Laurie David, environmental activist and

founder of stopglobalwarming.org

This is a magnificent book; exciting, poetic, passionate—and full of knowledge we all need and can act upon before it’s too late.

—Redmond O’Hanlon

"In his previous books, Tim Flannery took us on compelling journeys into the human and non-human past. Now he brings his wit, wisdom, and eloquence to bear on our future as a civilization, a future we have recklessly undermined but may still be able to secure. Thoroughly researched, closely reasoned, and eloquently written, The Weather Makers is a book of the utmost importance to everyone on Earth. It is essential reading for the halls of power, especially in Canberra, Texas, and Washington."

—Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress,

broadcast as the Massey Lecture series 2004

With his usual outstanding writing, Tim Flannery has introduced us to a whole interconnected world of climate change, one that has been much debated but little understood. It is difficult to misunderstand the convincing connections presented in this landmark book, which should be read by everyone concerned with the world’s future. Climate change is the single most important driving force that will negatively affect the future of the human race unless we do something about it now. Tim Flannery makes it clear why this is so and provides a blueprint for getting ahead of the curve and creating a sustainable world for the future.

—Peter H. Raven, Director, Missouri Botanical Garden

This concise and elegantly written book arms us with the facts we need to change our ways (and the calamitous ways of our handlers). Tremendously informative. Essential reading.

—Joy Williams, author of Ill Nature

"Our ultimate folly could be reckless change of the climatic system on which life on Earth and our civilization depend. The Weather Makers is a wonderfully lucid and compelling account of the climate change issue and how its solution is in our own hands. This is Tim Flannery’s best and most important book."

—Thomas E. Lovejoy, President, The Heinz Center for

Science, Economics and the Environment

Finally, a book about a global crisis that people can understand. All of us who are dubious, or skeptical, or can’t make sense of the passionate warnings about climate change will find in this book a clear distillation of the salient facts and their meaning.

—Sharon Butala, author of Lilac Moon and

The Perfection of the Morning

"No current field of study is as diverse or as important to the planet’s future as global warming. Tim Flannery has assimilated a vast amount of really alarming information and turned it—beautifully—into a truly terrifying book. The Weather Makers should make us all sit up nights, taking notice."

—Wayne Grady, author of The Quiet Limit of the World:

A Journey to the North Pole to Investigate Global Warming

THE

WEATHER

MAKERS

Other books by Tim Flannery

Mammals of New Guinea

Tree Kangaroos: A Curious Natural History

with R. Martin, P. Schouten, and A. Szalay

Possums of the World: A Monograph of the Phalangeroidea

with P. Schouten

Mammals of the South West Pacific and Moluccan Islands

Watkin Tench, 1788 (ed.)

The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (ed.)

Throwim Way Leg

The Birth of Sydney

Terra Australis: Matthew Flinders’ Great Adventures in the

Circumnavigation of Australia (ed.)

The Eternal Frontier

The Explorers

A Gap in Nature with P. Schouten

Astonishing Animals with P. Schouten

THE

WEATHER

MAKERS

HOW MAN IS CHANGING THE CLIMATE

AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR LIFE ON EARTH

TIM FLANNERY

Copyright © 2005 by Tim Flannery

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [e-mail].

Originally published in 2005 by Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Australia

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flannery, Tim F. (Tim Fridtjof), 1956–

The weather makers: how man is changing the climate and what it means for life on earth / Tim Flannery.

    p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-5558-4663-6 (e-book)

1. Climatic changes. 2. Global warming. I. Title.

QC981.8C5F438    2006

363.738′74—dc22                                       2005052350

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

To David and Emma, Tim and Nick, Noriko and Naomi,

Puffin and Galen, Will, Alice, Julia and Anna, and of course Kris,

with love and hope; and to all of their generation who will

have to live with the consequences of our decisions.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

MAP

THE SLOW AWAKENING

PART 1

GAIA’S TOOLS

GAIA

A great-aunt’s musings on the atmosphere. Wallace’s astonishing aerial ocean. Lovelock’s heresy: The data is thin and yet it lives. The importance of albedo. Ice crossing the line—until plankton tune the thermostat. Creating coal—another Gaian fine-tuning?

THE GREAT AERIAL OCEAN

The atmosphere’s four layers and the mystery of why, though closer to the sun, mountains are cold. The window in the brick wall of gases. A midsummer night’s nightmare in New York. Earth’s inspiration and indispensable interconnector. Pollution changes her nature and moods. Watching from Mauna Loa as the world draws breath.

THE GASEOUS GREENHOUSE

Early disbelief at the power of CO2. A mighty tough carbon budget. The thirty gases that heat the world. Methane: swamps, farts, and belches. The CFCs—Frankenstein creations of human ingenuity. Where do all the gigatons go? Earth’s carbon lungs, carbon stores, carbon kidney, and carbon Gaia. Lessons from a can of soda. The misleading Mississippi.

THE SAGES AND THE ONION SKIN

Carbon queries Man’s Place in the universe. Fumifugium and the suburbs of hell. Fourier’s freezing Earth. Svante Arrhenius seeks refuge from a messy marriage in calculation and discovers climate change. A prescient Callendar ignored by orthodoxy. Milankovich cycles from prison and takes the Great Prize. Spots on the sun? The fake Medieval Warm Period.

TIME’S GATEWAYS

Smutty Scots conquer time. Turning the key in time’s gateways. Better to live between than at the end of times. The sedimentary pianola roll, as played on isotopes of oxygen and carbon. Any time like the present? Norwegians uncover the great Paleocene fish bake. Climate sets the pace of evolution: Change it and you change life itself.

BORN IN THE DEEP FREEZE

From African cradle to world conquest against a backdrop of climate change. Secrets in timber and ice. The hot rocks of Greenland and the monster core from Dome C. Ten millennia of climatic see-saws herald dawn of the modern age. Just a few Sverdrups could sweep us into The Day after Tomorrow.

MAKING THE LONG SUMMER

The Anthropocene—our own geological period. But is it 200 or 8,000 years long? No farm before summer. Ruddiman’s gases nudge Milankovich, or do they? When things get crook in Uruk. Fagan’s famines and Ruddiman’s plagues. A stalled ice age?

DIGGING UP THE DEAD

Big Bill Neidjie’s wisdom. Coal, gas, and oil: the horsemen of the carbon apocalypse. Buried sunshine and carbon density. A brief history of coal. The Newcomen age, wherein coal is the universal fuel. Texan wildcats open the hydrocarbon century. The slipperiness of oil and the fortunate house of Saud. The dilemma of the deficit budget, the growing family, and the unquenchable addiction.

PART 2

ONE IN TEN THOUSAND

THE UNRAVELING WORLD

Passing through magic gates. The Methuselah coral. In 1976 the weather went wild and drove evolution. And again in 1998, this time with an El Niño turbo. The importance of quaint journals. Squeezing Edith’s checkerspot and driving nature poleward with a lash. Of oaks and winter moths. Sterilizing Lake Tanganyika. Establishing the global footprint of catastrophe. Burning the Nong.

PERIL AT THE POLES

A grassy Antarctic heralds the death of the cryosphere. The ever dwindling ice. Penguins follow crashing krill, and salps inherit the world. Bite of the spruce bark beetle. The demise of the lemming—murder not suicide. Thinner polar bears lose the third cub. The ice seals, and fate of the caribou.

2050: THE GREAT STUMPY REEF?

No beauty like a coral reef. Astonishing diversity—suffocated in sewage. Beauty’s crown of thorns. Fate of the virginal Myrmidon. So what is bleaching? The greatest half dead, the rest committed to die. The lesson of the Gobiodon. Fine fossil fishes of Verona. Is there hope in migration, or in adapting?

A WARNING FROM THE GOLDEN TOAD

Marty Crump—woman of the moment. Just twenty-one, mostly underground, and in serious trouble. The last toad orgy. The parable of the quetzal and the toucan. Dying lizards and the fortuitous weather station. Twelve years later we understand. Gone is the gastric brooder. Could it be global?

LIQUID GOLD: CHANGES IN RAINFALL

The tragedy of the Sahel—a moral tale. America’s west and Australia’s south: the new Saharas? In the midst of life, we find ourselves in Perth. Great suffering Sydney’s desalination solution? Way out west—cycles or the new climate?

AN ENERGETIC ONION SKIN

What controls the storms? Of heat, water, and hurricane fuel. From sweat to cyclones—explaining the fury of Mitch. Sparing the Bay of Bengal. Europe’s deadly summer. Svante warned us of warmer nights. You’ll see it in America.

PLAYING AT CANUTE

Of sea and land. Unleashing a juggernaut. Heat—easier to pull out of than push into the oceans. The big unknown, and the abrupt death of Larsen B. Great galloping glaciers. What of the WAIS? And Greenland? Add seven to seven. Two hundred and twenty feet to go. No home for Santa?

PART 3

THE SCIENCE OF PREDICTION

MODEL WORLDS

Captain Fitzroy launches the weather service. The world on a spinning dishpan. They got it right in ’75—for all the wrong reasons. Testing the ten GCMs and how clouds cloud the issue. Stevenson’s box and the embarrassment of the skeptics. Spitting ancestors. Predicting Pinatubo. Can we be more certain—and can 90,000 PCs be wrong? What about me? It’s only human to ask—but better not to. The end of the English garden? Regional predictions—the curate’s eggs of climatology.

THE COMMITMENT AND APPROACHING EXTREME DANGER

The planetary fifty-year catch-up, and the true cost of the fin-backed Chevrolets. The oceans are living in the seventies, and so is our industry. Both define our commitment, but George Dubya considerably extends it. The threshold of extreme danger—400 or 1,200 parts per million; or have we already crossed it?

LEVELING THE MOUNTAINS

Farewell the snows of Kilimanjaro. Submerging islands in the sky. If you’re at the peak, you’ve nowhere to go. A dreadful degree of certainty. Of golden bowerbirds, green ringtails, and tree kangaroos. World heritage lost. Consider a world without mountaintops.

HOW CAN THEY KEEP ON MOVING?

From Florida to Montreal—trees saved by a continent-long migration. Eucalyptus—the fate of 819 varieties. Demise of the fynbos and succulent karoo—the most beautiful flower gardens of the world. Australia’s southwest, forced into a corner. Them that can move’ll be the lucky ones. National parks become death traps. Megastudy sees commitment to extinction; but is it one in five, or six in ten?

BOILING THE ABYSS

Why do they die when we see them? The promise of megamouth—a world of unexplored astonishment. Acid oceans and shell-less pectens at the Poles. Prospect of the last oyster? Of netdevils and sea devils.

THE PACK OF JOKERS

The importance of positive feedback loops. Concert of the three scenarios. The Pentagon ponders the Gulf Stream—and sees in its demise the end of civilization. A sufficiency of Sverdrups. The tale of HadCM3LC and the TRIFFID. Death of the Amazon—a sign from the stomata. Unleash the clathrates! A clathrate bomb off a beach near you. Air conditioning, the mother of all positive feedbacks?

CIVILIZATION: OUT WITH A WHIMPER?

Our vaunted civilization and the cities at its center. Cities are like rain forests. What size climatic wave can wipe out a city? Food production—as specialized as a saber-toothed cat. Poor crops in a CO2-enriched world. The genocidal and Gaia-cidal aspects of adaptation. Survival of the village, and why it will be a mean, lean dark ages. It should have been obvious.

PART 4

PEOPLE IN GREENHOUSES

A CLOSE-RUN THING

The discovery of ozone a result of pure science. Bizarre decline put down to instrument error, but Nobels sort it out. Chicken Little and the sky-blue gas? If bromine were chlorine ... CFCs for cancers, blindness, and blight. No proof positive, but political agreement nonetheless. The Montreal Cure.

THE ROAD TO KYOTO

From Villach to Rio, things look rosy. Kyoto—attacking the toothless tiger. The carbon dollar and each nation’s cut. Hot air and the Australian position—a Kama Sutra user’s manual in matters of natural justice. Building the C-dollar: better top down or bottom up? The U.S. Senate warns of free riders. So if Kyoto’s broke, what next? Costs and damages—departures from the national self-interest prompted by delusions and greed.

COST, COST, COST

What’s driving the Kyoto renegades? The Department of Energy argues that saving the world is just too expensive. Mr. Lash exposed midstroke by Goodstein’s vinyl wonder. Reinsurers do the really important sums. Why children of the frontier fear Kyoto.

PEOPLE IN GREENHOUSES SHOULDN’T TELL LIES

The Intergovernmental Panel’s TAR and the oily Axis of Evil. Bulldust baffles brains, and consensus subverts science. White House whitewashes—from NASA to Harvard. Fred Palmer’s fertilization satisfies Bush Sr. The Climate Change Coalition and the crackpots. Wallop’s whoppers and other weird wonders. $60 million buys you the planet. DuPont acts to save the world, and so too the wondrous Lord Browne of Madingley. Davos delegates split on climate, and Lavoisier fights a rearguard action from down under.

ENGINEERING SOLUTIONS?

Let’s fertilize the oceans! Professor Ohsumi says don’t worry about mass death. Pity the plankton. Geosequestration—the wonder fix for coal, or is it? Nyos belches a warning. The gigaton problem and the Z-class reserve. Storing carbon in trees and the soil: It’s as easy as changing human nature. Well, maybe artificial photosynthesis will save us.

LAST STEPS ON THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN?

Why big oil wants to get gassy. Necessity solves expensive problems with lightweight gas. The lure of hydrogen—a gas with very expensive habits. The FreedomCAR conks out. Burned by the invisible flame? The danger of stalling on the last step.

PART 5

THE SOLUTION

BRIGHT AS SUNLIGHT, LIGHT AS WIND

Do we have the means to save the world? The Princeton Solution and the top fifteen technologies. Is our future blowing in the wind? The Danes don’t doubt it, they just do it—despite rumors of noise and dead birds. The solar thermal-wind challenge. And then there is light—wonders of the photovoltaic cell. How long the paybacks?

NUCLEAR LAZARUS?

Dr. Lovelock champions nuclear, but is it a goer? The cost of a reactor, the expense of a meltdown, and the price of security. And then there is waste—Yucca Mountains–full of it. China and India go on regardless, but will this return to haunt us? Geothermal energy: why it used to run out of hot water. But new geothermal rules, or does it? Let’s not forget stationary hydrogen.

OF HYBRIDS, MINICATS, AND CONTRAILS

Is biomass big enough to do the job? The wondrous Prius—about as good as it gets right now. Electric cars and the compressed-air MiniCAT—huge challenges to big oil in the era of the decarbonized grid. By air and by sea, ways must be found to go carbon free. The curse and blessing of the contrails.

THE LAST ACT OF GOD?

What a time the Sudanese would have in the courts! New England takes up the cudgels, and the Inuit follow. The dispossessed of Shishmaref—the world’s first climate change refugees. Everyone has the right to a nationality, or do they? The extinction of nations: Is it a crime? A bullying Australia. Tuvaluans take out precautionary New Zealand citizenship. A lawyer’s view on malnutrition and malaria, please!

2084: THE CARBON DICTATORSHIP?

Paul Crutzen—savior of the world twice over? Three possible outcomes. How the pollutors are giving birth to really big government. The Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control. How carbon-based government could end up controlling carbon-based life. An Orwellian nightmare.

TIME’S UP

Time is up. Sequestering biomass—a new way forward for the coal burners. The Arthur C. Clarke Fund for Avoidance of the Ice Age. Industrial-strength energy efficiency. The role of good laws. Contraction & Convergence—strong medicine for a near-fatal disease. No votes for those who say it can’t be done.

OVER TO YOU

Easy ways to save the world—begin by picking up the phone. Getting serious about hot water. The importance of efficiency ratings, and getting the kids onside. Going the whole nine solar yards. The town of Schoenau shows how revolutions can be won. Walking, biking, and hybrids.

POSTSCRIPT

AFTERWORD

CLIMATE CHANGE CHECKLIST

GREEN POWER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTES

INDEX

FOREWORD

I first met Tim Flannery on a tour of the South Australia Museum shortly after I joined BHP in 1998. On first meeting it was surprising to realize that this pleasant, unassuming fellow was the internationally acclaimed scientist I had heard so much about. After spending some time with him and reading several of his books, it became obvious that Tim was a compassionate individual with a brilliant analytical mind. He has the ability to distill the complex history of our planet into a relatively simple time-line that puts recorded history in perspective, as he did so well in The Future Eaters. At that time he alerted us to the fact that, in a delicately balanced environment, we may be tipping the scales in a way that will destroy much of the rich diversity we have inherited.

The real message of The Weather Makers is not that global warming is real, although he does an outstanding job of explaining the science in a way that any of us can understand. The point that he drives home is that it is an issue that we must address today if we are going to avert cataclysmic changes that could affect us all by 2050. And as he points out in the introduction, 70 percent of all people alive today will still be alive in 2050, so climate change affects almost every family on this planet.

Energy CEOs and environmental scientists are not likely to agree on all aspects of an issue as complex as climate change. But there is one view in which Tim and I are in total agreement—it is time to move from denial to action.

Paul Anderson

Chairman and CEO, Duke Energy Corp. and

Former Managing Director, BHP Billiton Ltd.

December 2005

THE SLOW AWAKENING

In 1981, when I was in my midtwenties, I climbed Mt. Albert Edward, one of the highest peaks on the verdant island of New Guinea. Although only seventy-four miles from Papua New Guinea’s national capital, Port Moresby, the region around Mt. Albert Edward is so rugged that the last significant biological work conducted there was by an expedition from the American Museum of Natural History in the early 1930s.

The bronzed grasslands were a stark contrast to the green jungle all around, and among the tussocks grew groves of tree ferns, whose lacy fronds waved above my head. Wallaby tracks threaded from the forest edge to the herbfields that flourished in damp hollows, and the scratchings and burrows of yardlong rats and the traces where long-beaked echidnas had probed for worms were everywhere. Many of these creatures, I later discovered, were unique to such alpine regions.

Downslope, the tussock grassland ended abruptly at a stunted, mossy forest. A single step could carry you from sunshine into the dank gloom, where the pencil-thin saplings on the margin were so festooned with moss, lichens, and filmy ferns that they ballooned to the diameter of my waist. In the leaf litter on the forest floor, I was surprised to find the trunks of dead tree ferns. Tree ferns grew only in the grassland, so here was clear evidence that the forest was colonizing the slope from below. Judging from the distribution of the tree fern trunks, it had swallowed at least thirty yards of grassland in less time than it takes for a tree fern to rot on the damp forest floor—a decade or two at most.

Why was the forest expanding? As I pondered the moldering trunks I remembered reading that New Guinea’s glaciers were melting. Had the temperature on Mt. Albert Edward warmed enough to permit trees to grow where previously only grasses could take root? And, if so, was this evidence of climate change? My doctoral studies were in paleontology, so I knew how important changes in climate have been in determining the fate of species. But this was the first evidence I’d seen that it might affect Earth during my lifetime. The experience left me troubled; I knew there was something wrong but not quite what it was.

Despite the good position I was in to understand the significance of these observations, I soon forgot about them. This was partly because, as I studied the various ancient ecosystems that our generation has inherited, seemingly bigger and more urgent issues demanded my attention. And some of the crises did seem dire: The rain forests that I was studying were being felled for timber and to make agricultural land, and the larger animal species living there were being hunted to extinction. In my own country of Australia, rising salt was threatening to destroy the most fertile soils, while overgrazing, degradation of waterways, and the logging of forests all threatened precious ecosystems and biodiversity. To me these were the truly pressing issues.

Whether we are crossing the road or paying the bills, it is the big, fast-moving things that command our attention. But seemingly large issues sometimes turn out to be a sideshow. The Y2K bug is one such example. Around the globe many governments and companies spent billions to prepare themselves against the threat, while others spent nothing; and 1999 gave way to 2000 with barely a hiccup, let alone an apocalypse. A skeptical eye is our greatest asset in dealing with this type of problem. And deep skepticism has a particularly important role to play in science, for a theory is only valid for as long as it has not been disproved. Scientists are in fact trained skeptics, and this eternal questioning of their own and others’ work may give the impression that you can always find an expert who will champion any conceivable view.

While such skepticism is the lifeblood of science, it can have drawbacks when society is called on to combat real dangers. For decades both the tobacco and asbestos industries found scientists prepared publicly to be doubtful about discoveries linking their products with cancer. A nonspecialist cannot know whether the view being presented is fringe or mainstream thinking, and so we may come to believe that there is a real division in the scientific community on these matters. In the case of asbestos and tobacco, the situation was made worse because cancers often appear years after exposure to carcinogenic products, and no one can say for certain just who, among the many exposed, will be struck down. By creating doubt about the link between their products and cancer, the tobacco and asbestos companies enjoyed decades of fat profits, while millions of people met terrible deaths.

And many people have reacted with rightful caution to news about climate change. After all, we have in the past got things badly wrong.

In the 1972 publication The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome told us the world was running out of resources and predicted catastrophe within decades. In an era of excessive consumption this imagined drought of raw materials gripped the public imagination, even though no one knew with any degree of certainty what volume of resources lay hidden in the earth. Subsequent geological exploration has revealed just how wide of the mark our estimates of mineral resources were back then, and even today no one can accurately predict the volume of oil, gold, and other materials beneath our feet.

The climate change issue is different. It results from air pollution, and the size of our atmosphere and the volume of pollutants that we are pouring into it are known with great precision. The debate now, and the story I want to explore here, concerns the impacts of some of those pollutants (known as greenhouse gases) on all life on Earth.

Is climate change a terrible threat or a beat-up? A bang or a whimper? Perhaps it’s something in between—an issue that humanity must eventually face, but not yet. The world’s media abound with evidence to support any of these views. Yet perusing that same media makes one thing clear: Climate change is difficult for people to evaluate dispassionately because it entails deep political and industrial implications, and because it arises from the core processes of our civilization’s success. This means that, as we seek to address this problem, winners and losers will be created. The stakes are high, and this has led to a proliferation of misleading stories as special interest groups argue their case.

What’s more, climate change is a breaking story. Just over thirty years ago the experts were at loggerheads about whether Earth was warming or cooling—unable to decide whether an icehouse or a greenhouse future was on the way. By 1975, however, the first sophisticated computer models were suggesting that a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere would lead to an increase in global temperature of around five degrees Fahrenheit. Still, concern among both scientists and the community was not significant. There was even a period of optimism, when some researchers believed that extra CO2 in the atmosphere would fertilize the world’s croplands and produce a bonanza for farmers.

But by 1988 climate scientists had become sufficiently worried about CO2 to establish a panel, staffed with the world’s leading experts, to report twice each decade on the issue. Their third report, issued in 2001, sounded a note of sober alarm—yet many governments and industry leaders were slow to take an interest. Because concern about climate change is so new, and the issue is so multidisciplinary, there are few true experts in the field, and even fewer who can articulate what the problem might mean to the general public and what we should do about it.

For years I resisted the impulse to devote research time to climate change. I was busy with other things, and I wanted to wait and see, hoping an issue so big would sort itself out. Perhaps it would be centuries before we would need to think intensively about it. But by 2001, articles in scientific journals indicated that the world’s alpine environments were under severe threat. As I read them, I remembered those rotting tree fern trunks in Mt. Albert Edward’s forest, and I knew that I had to learn more. This meant teaching myself about greenhouse gases, the structure of our atmosphere, and how the industrialized world powers its engines of growth.

For the last 10,000 years, Earth’s thermostat has been set to an average surface temperature of around 57°F. On the whole, this has suited our species splendidly, and we have been able to organize ourselves in a most impressive manner—planting crops, domesticating animals, and building cities. Finally, over the past century, we have created a truly global civilization. Given that in all of Earth history the only other creatures able to organize themselves on a similar scale are ants, bees, and termites—which are tiny in comparison and have concomitantly small resource requirements—this is quite an achievement.

Earth’s thermostat is a complex and delicate mechanism, at the heart of which lies carbon dioxide, a colorless and odorless gas. CO2 plays a critical role in maintaining the balance necessary to all life. It is also a waste product of the fossil fuels that almost every person on the planet uses for heat, transport, and other energy requirements. On dead planets such as Venus and Mars, CO2 makes up most of the atmosphere, and it would do so here if living things and Earth’s processes did not keep it within bounds. Our planet’s rocks and waters are packed with carbon itching to get airborne and oxidized. As it is, CO2 makes up around 3 parts per 10,000 in Earth’s atmosphere. It’s a modest amount, yet it has a disproportionate influence on the planet’s temperature. Because we create CO2 every time we drive a car, cook a meal, or turn on a light, and because the gas lasts around a century in the atmosphere, the proportion of CO2 in the air we breathe is rapidly increasing.

The institutions at the forefront of climate change research are situated half a world away from my home in Adelaide, so for a time I flew frequently across the globe. One night when en route from Singapore to London, as we crossed the great Eurasian landmass, I looked out of the cabin window at a city illuminated below. Its network of lights stretched from horizon to horizon, and the lights burned so bright—with so much energy—as to alarm me. From a height of 33,000 feet the atmosphere seemed so thin and fragile—the breathable part of it lay 16,500 feet below our aircraft. I asked the airline steward where we were. She gave me the name of a city I didn’t know. With a jolt I realized that the world is full of such cities, whose fossil-fuel-driven lights cause our planet to blaze into the night sky.

By late 2004, my interest had turned to anxiety. The world’s leading science journals were full of reports that glaciers were melting ten times faster than previously thought, that atmospheric greenhouse gases had reached levels not seen for millions of years, and that species were vanishing as a result of climate change. There were also reports of extreme weather events, long-term droughts, and rising sea levels.

For months I tried to fault the new research findings and discussed them at length with friends and colleagues. Only a few people seemed aware