The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change (review)

Tim Flannery is a kind of scientific superstar in his home country of Australia. He has challenged Prime Minister John Howard's opposition to robust action to limit the pollution that causes climate change, an opposition to doing anything about the problem that has been exceeded only by that of his close ally in the United States, President George W. Bush. Anyone interested in this book might do well to begin by exploring Flannery's own website, part advertisement for the book and part useful resource for teachers who want to use it in the classroom. Flannery's celebrity extends even outside Australia. Indeed, even British Prime Minister Tony Blair and ethicist Peter Singer have endorsed the book, with the latter calling it "the book the world has been waiting for—and needed—for decades" (p. iii).

While the high level praise may be an overstatement for those who have read other, less aggressively marketed, books on climate change, and despite the potential for Flannery's celebrity to be off-putting for serious scholars and teachers of global environmental politics, this book is a valuable resource that deserves to be read. Its strength is in roughly the first half where Flannery describes Earth's ancient climate system and the "aerial ocean" that regulated climate until the Industrial Age. Flannery turns the evolution of this atmospheric ocean, as well as the natural fluctuations in temperatures through time, into a fascinating detective story. He adeptly describes many of the major indicators of climate change, ranging from die-offs of coral reefs and the explosion in spruce-bark beetles to the increasingly common El Nino phenomenon and the breakup of thousand-year-old ice shelves.

One major achievement of the book is the way it helps readers understand the science of climate change, explaining the role of environmental thresholds and unpredictable outcomes, and the importance of seemingly paradoxical impacts such as declines in food production in a CO₂-enriched world. It is the kind of scientific story telling that can draw readers in, and its especially accessible and illuminating for laypeople who might have trouble comprehending the complexity of atmosphere's history, not least all of the highly complex connections to, and consequences for, the seas, weather and the fate of species through time. As background to the latest science and as a basis for looking at the national and international politics of climate change, the book is thus a useful resource for students and non-academics.

The book is less useful in those areas that might directly interest students and specialists in the study of global environmental politics: the diplomacy and policy of climate change, on one hand, and the political possibility of technological solutions, on another. The book does a good job of covering much of the climate change diplomacy and politics, albeit in a slightly hodgepodge way (with chapter titles like "People in Greenhouses Shouldn't Tell Lies"). These sections are easily accessible to general readers because, for better or worse, they read a bit like sensational journalism. The book lacks substantial in-depth analysis of domestic and international politics of climate change, apart from the usual simplistic (but also true) assumption that much policy development has been captured by big oil, with some more enlightened, forward-thinking businesses attempting to find profitable solutions.

The closing section of the book focuses on a number of possible solutions to climate change. These range from undesirable options, such as a sort of global dictatorship with an "Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control" (p. 291) to more palatable and likely solutions, including sequestration of biomass, "industrial-strength energy efficiency," solar power and the most readily available options of all—"walking, biking and hybrids" (p. 302). Few of the proposed solutions are unique, and with other books on climate change—such as former US Vice President Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth—displayed in the front of chain bookstores in some countries, The Weather Makers will not...