climate change

Lovins, L. Hunter and Boyd Cohen (2011) Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

If you know Hunter Lovins, this book sounds just like her. The first chapter is a powerful manifesto for why reducing GHG’s is good for business. The rest of the book is packed with examples and statistics. Every executive should read this.

Pearson, Richard, (2011) Driven to Extinction: The Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity. New York, NY: Sterling.

Published by the American Museum of Natural History, this book tries to validate or invalidate claims that climate change will be disastrous to biodiversity. It’s not written by a naysayer, only a scientist interested in accuracy over media hype. Chapters take you around the world to examine different situations and relationships, evidence for and against the impact of climate change on species. In many situations, the impacts are clearly evident. Certain plants and animals are found moving toward the poles. In some cases, the impacts may come more from side-effects than temperature. The loss of certain amphibians like the Golden Tree Frog of Costa Rica is likely a result of changing moisture levels and a disease that thrives at certain temperatures that was spread around the world by the importation of African Clawed Frogs because they were handy for human pregnancy tests. In some situations, species become out of sync with one another such that the food is not available for the predators when they hatch or arrive. But the relationships are very species specific. So some species are much less likely to be affected, either because their cycles and those of their food are tied to photoperiod (length of days) or because they have adaptive behaviors (like polar bears preying on goose eggs, which then begs the question, what will happen to the geese and the ecosystems dependent upon them.)

In the end, Pearson concludes, “Overall, it is fair to say that, unless major changes in international policies lead to substantial decreases in greenhouse gas emissions, the most likely outcome is that global warming will lead to extensive and irreversible transformations of ecosystems. But whether this will amount to catastrophe‑meaning the collapse of ecosystems and mass extinction—is unclear. My intention is not to sit on the fence on this central matter, but rather to make the important point that the future is uncertain. The fact that we cannot predict how bad the impacts will be is perhaps the most compelling reason for taking action to reduce the risks.” (p204-5)

His major recommendation is that we need to facilitate the dispersal of species. There are programs like Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) but approximately 40 percent of the land on earth is devoted to agriculture so programs known as agri-environment schemes will be particularly important. 

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Whitmarsh, Lorraine, Sarffron O’Neill and Irene Lorenzoni (eds.) (2011) Engaging the Public with Climate Change. London, England: Earthscan.

This book pulls together a number of academic studies on what works and doesn’t for getting the public to care about and act on climate change. While each chapter was written by a different author, the style was consistent (although unfortunately for my tastes, consistently academic). The table on page 7 gives a nice run-down of the authors, topics and disciplines represented. Topics range from changing habits, new forms of democracy, usefulness of mindfulness to combat consumption, eco-teams, low-carbon communities, and media. What I really want now is the article pulling together the lessons learned. This book is UK centric but the lessons are widely applicable.

Lenart, Melanie (2010) Life in the Hothouse: How a living planet survives climate change. University of Arizona Press: Tucson, AZ.

This is not about how humans will adapt; this is how the planet may adapt to hotter temperatures. Lenart walks you through what is known from science about how the planet corrects itself. This is not to say we have nothing to worry about. She walks through the likely effects of climate change, some widely known and some not. But it is with wonder that we can observe the self-correcting, stabilizing mechanisms the earth does have. Higher temps will likely bring more precipitation (at least in some areas), which increases weathering and drags nutrients and carbon into the sea where some of it can be sequestered. Hurricanes and monsoons temporarily boost the local productivity of the seas affected, organisms that quickly run out of food, die and sink to the ocean floor. Higher CO2 levels (to a point) increase plant growth so tropical rain forests are growing faster than expected. I was left with an appreciation for Gaia, the elegant system of checks and balances, which may not on our timescale save us but are there nonetheless.

My biggest complaint about this book is the total absence of any visual markers. Instead of headings, chapters are broken up by some undecipherable and tiny icon/Rorschach test. There are no graphs or visuals. I suspect this may have been a dissertation that the University saw fit to publish. It’s interesting content but unnecessarily hard to absorb because of the lack of visual formatting.

McAllister, Judy, Erik van Praag and Jan Paul van Soest (2010) Earth Fever: Living Consciously with Climate Change. Cosimo: New York, NY.

This book takes a steel-eyed look at the likelihood that we’ll stop GHG’s at 450 ppm. Perhaps realistic but pretty depressing. After reviewing the state of affairs, the second half of the book attempts to provide tools for living with this reality. The authors summarize a lot of work of others (Presencing by Senge, Sacred Contract by Carolyn Myss, right livelihood concepts from Buddhism. If you want an easy introduction to spirituality, this might be useful but it lacked the structure to lead me to action. I would have preferred a more directive approach versus the ‘survey course’ approach the authors employed. It wasn’t clear how these methods would solve the problem of mitigation or adaptation. It felt like two essays, sandwiched together.
 

Miller, Debra (ed) (2010) Conserving the Environment. New Haven, CT: Greenhaven Press.

This book is one of a series that lays out both sides of an issue, with authors presenting different points of view, which could make it a convenient teaching tool. This book covered climate change, biodiversity loss, and steps needed to protect the environment. That’s an odd assortment. You might assume that in the case of climate change, the debate would be between the doubters and the doomsayers. But that was not the case. Probably the most interesting insight for me was that the arguments against positions I might hold myself were less about questioning the need.

The authors, by and large, didn’t question the need to do something about climate change, for example. Their position was just that there was only so much money to go around and we shouldn’t forget other pressing issues like HIV/AIDS, malaria, etc. Mostly the issues were about clamoring for whose issue was the biggest, the one deserving the most attention. And to me, this was a symptom of the lack of systems thinking. Everything is connected, right? We have to solve all these problems. To me the issue is not money, it’s about will.

Paskal, Cleo (2010) Global Warring: How environmental, economic, and political crises will redraw the world map. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

No, that’s not a typo; it’s a play on words. Global Warring, not Warming. Think geo-politics meets climate change. Despite the book’s title, this is less about war and more about nation’s jockeying for position. Much of the book examines the positioning that is already underway to control the Arctic Sea once we’ve defrosted the last of the ice.

Paskal brings a historical perspective, drawing lessons from past fights over shipping lanes. You’d think in this modern age that ships would no longer be so strategic. For heavens sake, this isn’t the time of the British Empire. But in a globalized world, it is a lifeblood. She explains, “This expansion through importation is also what made most modern powers, which is why transportation routes are so critical.”

She also considers the impacts of rising sea levels to national security, mostly from the perspective of the US. For example, we may lose a vast portion of the Gulf Coast, from Houston to Mobile, in the next 50-100 years, (where ¼ of the oil and about 15% of the natural gas is produced and where a number of refineries are located). A storm surge less than that of Katrina also could flood a significant percentage of ports, interstates, railroads and even some airports.

The author reveals how much more strategic China is being, with their ‘nationalistic capitalism.’ A Chinese company, HPH, runs many of the ports and shipping choke points (including the Panama Canal.) As she puts it, “Countries in which national security policy makers don’t have control over energy supplies…are geopolitically more vulnerable than more politically integrated nations.” China is also seen by some as a better negotiation partner because their interests are clear and their policy is less likely to change than in the US where Congress changes its mind regularly.

She also examines the interests of many other nations. The arctic sea lanes are opening along Russia before Canada. India is considering requiring that all new infrastructure be ‘climate proofed. Europe may soon find dangerous heatwaves and every-other-year phenomenon.

This book will have you considering a whole new basket of issues to worry about. You better hope the policy wonks are reading this book.

Brune, Michael (2008) Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

The author is the executive director of Rainforest Action Network. Each chapter includes startling facts and recommended actions you can take personally (behavior and activism). But in the end, I couldn’t get through the book, even after renewing it at the library a couple times. Something else always seemed more appealing to read. After a while, my brain goes numb from facts and angry accusations. I recognize that there is an important role activists have but I’m not one of them. It doesn’t make sense to me to blame people. For example, in the book, Blume points out that the amount of money Citi and Bank of America will spend to invest in or finance renewables is a fraction of what they have invested in traditional energy. Um, well, have you checked the mutual funds in your 401-K recently? This is a societal problem and vilifying certain organizations seems counter-productive to me. I’ll admit that sometimes they need a shot across the bow but I don’t care to be the one with the cannon.

That said, this book is well researched so there are a lot of good factoids here that (in moderation) could spice up a presentation:

• Alberta tar sands oil: to get one barrel of oil, you dig up 4 tons; it has 3x the ghg’s of conventional oil.
• US subsidies for oil: $39 billion including guarding the Alaskan pipeline and Persian Gulf (2007)
• Transportation: US spend about 1 billion on Amtrak (2003) but China is spending $16-20 billion on passenger rail. The EU allocates about 20% of their transportation budget to this; US, 2%
• Coal: American Lung Association estimates that coal plants cause 550,000 asthma attacks, 38,000 heart attacks, 12,000 hospital admissions and 24,000 premature deaths.

For those of us in the US where we still don’t have an energy policy, it’s sobering to see the investments that China, Europe, Japan and even Mexico are putting into things like high-speed rail. However, since the book was published in 2008, many of the factoids are now several years old.