3 horsemen of eco-apocalypse: Authors foresee hot, stormy world with little drinkable water

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Brian Chapman / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

The Weather Makers

By Tim Flannery

Allen Lane, 341 pp, 20 pounds

The Revenge of Gaia

By James Lovelock

Allen Lane, 177 pp, 16.99 pounds

When the Rivers Run Dry

By Fred Pearce

Beacon Press, 324 pp, 26.95 dollars

Most people who bother to study the situation agree that the Earth is ecologically in a bad way. But the exact major areas of concern, their causes and what to do about them is where it gets complicated and controversial.

With this in mind come three new books by leading researchers and activists that seek to address pressing environmental issues. One aims to cogently explain the broad picture, one to rally the troops in a war for the planet, and one to figure out how to quench the world's thirst.

The Weather Makers, by Australian scientist and explorer Tim Flannery, is quite simply an attempt in 300 pages to explain in its entirety the current state of climate change. Flannery's argument is that the Earth is undergoing climate change--of which global warming is a part--and it is being caused by human actions, particularly by the burning of fossil fuels over the last two centuries.

Climate change is "difficult for people to evaluate dispassionately," he writes, "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...this has led to a proliferation of misleading stories as special interest groups argue their case."

Flannery takes the reader on a journey that first explores the question of what climate change is, and after showing it is indeed happening, explores what causes it, breaks down the science and research, addresses major problems and implications for our planet, and what solutions are needed. Never patronizing and always lucid, The Weather Makers does for climate change what Carl Sagan's Cosmos did for popularizing science and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time did for black holes. If one were to read only one book about the current state of the global environment, this would be it.

Flannery ends with an afterword written after "Hurricane Katrina burst upon New Orleans and changed climate history," and offers in a few pages an account of the disaster, how hurricanes form, and the question of whether Katrina was a symptom of climate change or a product of decadeslong storm cycles. He favors the former, and writes a convincing argument as to why.

And as if on cue, British scientist and activist James Lovelock opens The Revenge of Gaia with that same storm. But, "Horrific though it was, it distracts us from the more extensive suffering caused by the tsunami in December 2004...That awful event starkly revealed the power of the Earth to kill." For him, there is a bigger story to tell.

Lovelock, who coined the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory) and is frequently quoted in Flannery's work, does not have time to quibble over details about climate statistics or issues of biodiversity. Building off of his previous four works--each with "Gaia" in the title--his latest is not really about the revenge of Gaia, but a manifesto on what we need to do to prevent that revenge.

To Lovelock, Earth behaves like a living organism, called Gaia, that regulates itself in extremely complicated ways, always seeking balance between the forces of the sun's rays, Earth's atmosphere and life on the land and in the sea. Lovelock says Gaia is reaching, or has reached, a tipping point, and will soon lose its balance. It will recover from this, but most of us won't. His is a battle in the twilight of his life as the 86-year-old argues for the equivalent of ecological triage to save our planet from ending us.

Both Flannery and Lovelock take punches at Michael Crichton's recent global-warming-skeptical novel State of Fear, both explain the current use of advanced computer-powered climate modeling, both argue the Earth is at a critical, human-made juncture, and both hope it can be fixed and offer ways to make it better. But there are some disturbing differences in methodology.

While Flannery prefers a story filled with facts and detail, Lovelock aims for the gut, preferring metaphors that tap readers' emotions, making no apology for his unorthodox views. Flannery may be more convincing, but Lovelock is the one who stirs new ideas--especially when it comes to solutions.

"The most important thing to realise is that we can all make a difference and help combat climate change at almost no cost to our lifestyle," writes Flannery.

"To undo the harm we have already done requires a programme whose scale dwarfs the space and military programmes, in cost and size," writes Lovelock.

The top priority, both agree, is reducing greenhouse gasses, particularly carbon dioxide. But Lovelock despises ecological utopians who advocate overthrowing civilization, growing only organic food or going back to a hunter-gatherer way of life. Instead, cleaner energy generation needs to be implemented, and that means nuclear power.

"Almost a third of us will die of cancer anyway," he writes about what he sees as unfounded fears over nuclear safety.

He may at first sound like an old man who has finally lost it, but Lovelock ends up working a disturbing and compelling argument for the most readily available CO2-free energy source. At times, though, such as when arguing the negligible loss of life expectancy by atomic bomb survivors and residents near Chernobyl, he comes very close to mirroring the argumentative style of those who say global warming is a hoax.

But there is one major environmental issue both Lovelock and Flannery fail to address, and it is the sole concern of London-based environmental journalist Fred Pearce's When the Rivers Run Dry, which is best described as a collection of vignettes about the state of the world's water supply, which doesn't look too good.

Pearce travels the world--to the disappearing Aral Sea, the flooding of central Europe in 2003, the dried-up Rio Grande on the U.S.-Mexico border, the depleted aquifers of Israel, Colorado, Sydney and Pakistan, the annual flooding of Cambodia, and dozens of other places--to show that our immediate threat is making sure the world has enough water to sustain over 6 billion people. It is a complicated problem of enormous consequences that can be overlooked in the face of more romantic ecological issues, and his assessment is dire.

The devil is in the details, and Pearce offers plenty of them, making harsh assessments of the effectiveness of dams, mass irrigation projects and the politics of international water supply.

Included is a side of the Katrina story both Lovelock and Flannery neglected--the controlling of the Mississippi River at its mouth has eliminated most of the estuary south of New Orleans, which, like a sponge, would have absorbed much of the storm surge. It is an example of how governments and people alike need to look at the more practical side of immediate water needs while also keeping the big picture in mind, instead of relying on idealistic engineering solutions.

It is a conclusion all three authors share--the path to saving the world is paved with knowledge. Even though there is much left to learn and understand, "That should not," Flannery writes, "be used as an excuse for inaction."