Book report

Caroline Smith

Book report on Fixing Climate

October 7 2008

Prof. Foerstner

So what do Ice Ages and climate change and global warming have in common? According to scientist Wallace Broecker, "until you understand ice ages [...]--the biggest environmental change our planet has known in the past few million years--you haven't understood climate." "Fixing Climate" was a fast read and in this day and age of esoteric, dense science books, it is a feat to find one both informative and engaging, without losing thorough scientific explanation or becoming too inaccessible. Broecker is the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and an expert in geosciences and the Ice Age. The journalistic skills of Robert Kunzig takes us through decades of scientific research to finally arrive at our present day (and some would argue) dire climate and environmental situation. Kunzig is careful to explain many different scientific approaches and discoveries to teach the reader a basic understanding of climate history and change. He is also careful to explain the face behind the science as well and breaks the more academic side of the scientists/researchers with stories of funny individual eccentricities. Thus, while "Fixing Climate" is a comprehensive novel on past climate changes and what they reveal about the current threat to future climate changes, the history of science itself is not necessarily logical and definitely not static, nor are the people who advance it. It's more like a wild beast, much like Broecker's metaphorical climate beast.

Before you get to present day problems of global warming, the reader will become intimately acquainted with glacial jargon (ie moraines, snow lines) and the significance of the past and present existence of glaciers. "The glaciers were like thermometers that revealed the temperature of the past." pg 32 The Last Glacial Maximum, around 17,600 years ago, terminated at an almost unprecedented speed (in geological terms about a thousand years) and scientists from there linked it to carbon dioxide. The scientist Charles David Keeling discovered CO2 and was well mixed around the planet. His contribution to the knowledge of the gradual rise in CO2 due to his Keeling Curve model has helped shape scientific and public consciousness to this day. One of Broecker's many contributions and one of his biggest theories is of an oceanic 'conveyor belt' which constantly transports heat into and salt out of the North Atlantic. He believes a jamming of this conveyor belt caused all of the Ice Ages and is could very well happen again, given Earth's history and human interference. "Broecker estimate[s] that about one-third of the fossil fuel CO2 is being taken up by the ocean. With half staying in the air, according to Keeling's measurements, that [leaves] a sixth being absorbed by plants on land." pg 85 However, as Kunzig points out, the bottom line is that the land nor the ocean will save humans from the effects of our fossil fuel habits.

Like many other science and climate books out there, "Fixing Climate" not surprisingly has an alarmist tone and for good reason. However what sets it apart is that it offers realist solutions. Only recently has the "signal" of man-made climate change begun to emerge from the background "noise" of natural variability. When climate models include only natural effects on climate, they can't reproduce the warming of the past three decades at all. "When Earth gets warmer or colder," Kunzig writes, "it is not just the temperature that changes, and not just the sea level. The whole global water cycle changes too, shifting the distribution of rain--and with it the boundaries between places that are eminently livable for people, and others that are not so." pg 161

Both "Fixing Climate" and the IPCC report described the climate changes that have happened and are happening (ie droughts, sea level rise, as well as stating that stabilizing current CO2 emissions is not enough. The realist approach is that not only will the world NOT stabilize, but will continue at a break neck speed putting MORE CO2 in the air. Realistically, "there are not enough arable lands for biofuels, not enough volcanic spots for geothermal energy, and not enough dammable rivers for hydroelectricity ever to become more than small pieces of the solution to the climate problem." pg 193 So what is mankind to do? Presently scientist Klaus Lackner and the Wright brothers (Allen and Burt) may have a realist answer in the works. The answer is a proto-type CO2 scrubber which in essence, is designed to "scrub" CO2 out of the air. The bigger question then is where to dispose of it all? The ocean? Ultramafic rocks? There is one absolute certainty: "no significant solution to the CO2 problem can emerge until governments worldwide, and especially that of the United States, follow the lead of Norway and of the European Union and impose either an emissions cap or a direct tax on CO2." pg 230 One can only hope current and future administrations as well as businesses and civil society will take note of books like "Fixing Climate" and seriously think about the problem at hand.