THE WEATHER MAKERS by Tim Flannery

Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” is a brilliantly accessible account of climate change, the most difficult and complex problem that humanity has yet to face. I use the world “yet’ because there has been no successfully coordinated global effort to combat the green house gasses that are destabilizing the earth’s natural climate cycle. Individual governments are taking baby steps, as political opponents become reluctant advocates on behalf of their concerned constituents.

Sorry to ramble off a bit, there are many good books on the subject of climate change. One excellent book is HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED: WHY WE NEED A GREEN REVOLUTION—AND HOW IT CAN RENEW AMERICA by Thomas L. Friedman, but Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” puts forward three good arguments that I’ve not seen so clearly articulated anywhere else, the legal end of ‘Act of God,’ the first world’s genocide of the third world, and the potential for a new global dictatorship.

In the chapter “The Last Act of God,” Flannery puts his spin on end of the insurance industry’s ability to apply the phrase ‘Act of God,’ which refers to natural disasters that are violent and sudden physical hazards, which no man could have hoped to have foreseen (and by implication God’s doing). When climate change science is integrated into all sectors of business and industry, it will become clear that major climate shifts, for example drought, will no longer be God’s doing. Instead, it will be argued that humanity is solely responsible because we have destabilized earth’s climatic regulatory system that controls yearly average rainfall. The victims of drought, mostly regions that were already arid to begin with, will take legal action against those who brought about climate change: industrialized, CO2 emitting countries.

Industrialized countries, like the United States, that have know for sometime that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses have been altering the earth’s ability to regulate climate with no longer be seen as world leaders, but as conspirators bent on committing genocide against the third world, as Flannery puts forward in the chapter, “Civilization: Out with a Whimper.” Because Flannery spells the controversy out so well, I will quote from page 208:

“English environmental politician Aubrey Myer pointed out how this matter is being discussed at the highest levels. Economists who participated in the IPCC discussions stated that doing anything serious climate change was too expensive to be worthwhile, leading in Meyer’s view to ‘the effective murder of members of the world’s poorer populations,’ whose lives by the economists estimates were worth only a fifteenth of that of a rich person.”

Apologies to my boss, an economist, but only an economist would reduce human life to its base potential to contribute to the global economy, and ignore the damage that climate change will have on natural capital, upon which all economies depend.

This brings me to last of Flannery’s well-wrought arguments that I will address here, that if we do not act to limit the introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere, the only real solution will be a global carbon dictatorship. In Flannery’s chapter, “2084: The Carbon Dictatorship?,” he speculates that they only way that CO2 emissions could be sufficiently regulated and reduced (if we do not act right now) will be a global organization focused solely on policing greenhouse gasses. This dictatorship will be force the greatest shift in wealth ever speculated through a cap and trade like system that would require countries like the United States of America to buy carbon credits from a country with excess credits, do to their low emissions, in order to continue business as usual – driving cars, powering heating and AC unites, and the millions of gadgets that are slaved to fossil fuel.

Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” is a truly enjoyable book that is accessibility written on the most important subject humanity has ever faced. As an instructor of environmental science, I privilege of a captive audience on which I press the importance of understanding earth’s various systems and how they interact, creating the fragile requirements to sustain life, including ours. Humans are not separate from nature. We are a single species among earth’s biodiversity, which, just like the social insects and viruses, have the ability to drastically alter our environment to suit our needs, with one minor exception: we have the cognitive ability to know better.

So, to end this overly long review, those of us who know better have the obligation to educate those who don’t yet understand their impact on environmental systems, and those who have the power to make laws to spur change, must, or voters must seek alternative leaders.

Flannery, Tim. “The Weather Makers.” New York: Grove Press, 2005