Climate Books Suddenly Popular

Commentary by John C.Topping, Jr.
President, Climate Institute

About a year ago we posted a Commentary on the growing popularity of Climate Cartoons that on most days is the most visited single feature on this site. Just as political cartoons and videos are an indication that climate change has moved front and center in the public mind, the growing profusion of books on the topic suggests that climate change has reached past academe to become a topic of concern for millions.

Some fairly serious works are in the bookstores or are about to come out—among them what I believe will be a compelling work by the Climate Institute, Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change: Exploring the Real Risks and How We Can Avoid Them. This book, edited primarily by Michael MacCracken and Frances Moore with this commentator also having played a small role, distills the September 2006 deliberations of the Climate Institute's three and a half day 20th Anniversary Washington Summit on Climate Stabilization into a highly readable work on what is at risk from climate change and on innovative measures that can avert the worst of the potential adverse impacts. This book, to be published by Earthscan, is due out just before year's end. About 2/3 of it concerns the likelihood of and possible impacts from sudden and disruptive climate change, including the possibility that we may be near tipping points in such crucial areas as polar deglaciation, Arctic Ocean albedo, and ecosystem and coastal region vulnerability — and the potential that the capacity of humans and natural systems to adapt may be overwhelmed. The book includes trenchant pieces by the top world experts on Greenland deglaciation, sea ice retreat, possible breakup of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, sea level rise and coastal vulnerability, and impacts on ecosystems, polar bears and fires in Arctic ecosystems.

The last third or so of the book provides hope that we may yet be able to avoid stepping over the precipice. Denis Hayes summarizes a remarkable panel on Intergenerational and International Equities in which thoughtful leaders from the Mormon, Jewish, Islamic, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal and Protestant Evangelical faiths indicated a growing awareness in each of their communities of a moral necessity to act to protect the global environment. Dan Worth, spearhead of the Campus Climate Neutral Movement, describes how students are seeking to make campuses an exemplar for broader societal transformation to clean and energy and smart design. Tom Casten argues persuasively that U.S. consumers and industry can save huge sums annually and cut greenhouse emissions as much as 20% by developing utility incentive policies that foster recycling of waste energy and greater use of locally generated power that involves far less transmission line loss. Casten, who has spurred the building of about 250 cogeneration facilities around the world, states that removing market restrictions on use of waste energy would yield large-scale economic benefits and at the same time make a big dent in emissions of greenhouse gases.

Overall, Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change combines a readability and breadth of scholarship that makes it a likely addition to the syllabuses of many college level courses on implications of climate change.

Casten's arguments show the short-sightedness of the thesis of Bjorn Lomborg in his latest work, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, that while global warming is real, most action to combat it would be a drag on the global economy. This Danish statistician, who has made much of his past involvement with Greenpeace, has become the favorite champion of those arguing for little or no action in the near and medium term to limit greenhouse emissions. As Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery points out in a review, Lomborg's prescriptions allow little room for the possibility that some higher end disruptive changes might occur.

Not so for two other excellent books, Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the Globe, by Gary Braasch, and Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change, by Paul Brown. Braasch, probably the most prominent photographic chronicler of climate change impacts, has made many of his photographs available on his website. For years Braasch, whom the Climate Institute recognized as an Unsung Hero of the Climate Wars at the 2006 Washington Summit on Climate Stabilization, has traveled across the globe capturing images of climate related changes already underway — in small island nations, mountain glaciers, and coastal areas. In his soon to be published book Earth Under Fire, Gary Braasch has prepared far more than a coffee table book, although it has many compelling photos. He has prepared a very succinct summary of what is at risk and enlisted the help of world-renowned scientists such as Stanford University's Stephen Schneider, a long-time Climate Institute Board member, to write significant sections. Published by University of California Press, Braasch's book has undergone rigorous scientific review. Its final section also shows that there are many changes that can be readily undertaken to reduce global greenhouse emissions without hindering the global economy.

Paul Brown has produced a book, Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change, that may — at least in its UK edition — require a coffee table to hold it. Drawing on the Photo Archives of Greenpeace as well as other photos, he has assembled a beautiful work. A news reporter and editor for 40 years, 24 with The Guardian, Brown has done a remarkable job of mastering material ranging from the implications of climate change for ecosystems and likelihood of an increase in extreme weather events to a wide array of measures to combat climate change. Like his Greenpeace collaborators, he is no fan of nuclear power that he characterizes as "Voodoo Economics." His concluding section, "What We Can Do," does, however, suggest a wide range of other actions that can be readily undertaken, including tapping of geothermal resources as Iceland has done, smarter building design, use of green roofs, etc. Dakini Books, a well respected British publisher, like the Climate Institute's publisher, Earthscan, is issuing a slightly revised edition for the US market this fall.

Less cosmic in its scope, but especially valuable for those concerned with the transportation sector, which is the source of nearly a third of greenhouse emissions in most industrialized countries, is Driving Climate Change: Cutting Carbon From Transportation, which is edited by Daniel Sperling and James S. Cannon, two well regarded transportation experts. This is a compilation of presentations from the 2006 Asilomar Conference in Pacific Grove, California convened by the Institute of Transportation Studies at University of California Davis. For a number of years the University of California Davis has convened conferences at this California retreat to study implications of transportation policy for societal concerns such as the environment. For the past two years the focus of this conference has been on transportation and climate and the Climate Institute has both times, in a modest way, been a sponsor. This year I had an opportunity to attend these deliberations. The roughly 200 participants included a hefty segment of the environmental and transportation communities of California, but also experts from elsewhere in the US, Canada, Japan, Germany and the UK. Driving Climate Change focuses on three areas: 1) reducing motorized travel, 2) shifting to less energy intensive modes, and 3) changing fuel and propulsion technologies. This year's presentations are already coming online.

Fiction is Sometimes Stranger than Truth

Just as I was preparing to publicize Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change, a book arrived in the mail from John A. Topping, an Atlanta attorney, investor and author. In the accompanying letter to his novel, Runaway, John A. Topping explained that he came across my name as he was googling to see how his book was being covered and was struck by the remarkable coincidence of names. John A. Topping has an interesting background in some ways paralleling mine — with a focus on Russian Studies as an undergraduate, a law school education and an eclectic range of interests. He comes from quite a sports family. His father, the late Dan Topping, was owner of the New York Yankees for 22 years when the baseball powerhouse won 18 pennants and 11 World Series, and his stepfather, the late Rankin Smith, owned the Atlanta Falcons football team. No relation to my Atlanta-based namesake, I paid my way into Yankee games on the few occasions when I attended a game at Yankee Stadium, and the happiest moment of my sports fan career came in October 1960 when my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates triumphed in the World Series over Dan Topping's Yankees on a seventh game, bottom of the ninth inning home run by Bill Mazeroski.

Published in 2001, Runaway begins in October 2006 when the protagonist, NASA contract scientist and computer genius Jason Graham, discovers that the Earth is facing a runaway greenhouse effect that will in about 15 years make the Earth virtually uninhabitable for humanity and most living beings. What is remarkable is that this first-time novelist was writing his book before the proliferation of reports on rapid sea ice melt with potential for albedo change, and evidence of rapid thawing of the permafrost that might generate huge releases of methane and set in motion a kind of metastatic climate change and also before a hardening of evidence that climate warming is likely to result in intensification of hurricanes. Although he takes the novelist's license to move the action into Fast Forward, compressing effects of a runaway greenhouse effect that might take a couple of centuries to play out into 15 years, John A. Topping does a remarkable job of extrapolating from the science to how this might play out in the real world with, for example, a dramatic increase in micro-bursts that makes air travel more and more hazardous, stress on food systems, temperatures over 130 F in parts of the US Southwest, and a devastating tsunami resulting from a sudden and huge Antarctic glacial collapse. Although well past what the most concerned climate scientists would expect to play out over 15 years, the climate aspects of the plot are far more plausible than the story line of the movie, Day After Tomorrow, that has a sudden change in ocean circulation sending much of North America almost overnight into an Ice Age. What takes the greatest flight of imagination in Runaway is the rapidity of the response — efforts to construct space cities and ground-based and self-contained arkopolises that will allow a significant remnant of humanity to ride out the catastrophic consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect so that, in a generation or two when humanity has figured out how to restore a habitable climate, humanity can begin to rebuild an Earth-bound civilization. Somehow it seems hard to imagine that a nation that has managed so little in rebuilding New Orleans in the two years since Katrina and that has been at a virtual impasse in addressing its decaying infrastructure even after the Minneapolis bridge collapse could respond so quickly.

An intriguing twist of the plot is the decision of those in the know to conceal the data from the public. Their models suggest that once humanity grasps the fate that is about to befall it, a mass demoralization will set in — people will stop working, Armageddonist cults will proliferate, and a disaster that might play out over 15 years will be telescoped to perhaps ten. Moreover, if people knew that only a handful would have an escape route, there would be a virtual rush for the lifeboats, drowning all and ending humanity. Consequently scientists embark on a systematic effort to falsify data so the public remains oblivious to the runaway greenhouse effect while these de facto lifeboats are being built. Here is the one resemblance to Michael Crichton's 2004 Novel, State of Fear, which had environmental groups hyping data and working with eco-terrorists to create a public panic over greenhouse warming. As a commentary in RealClimate indicates, Crichton's grasp of the science leaves a lot to be desired. Nevertheless drawing on his fan base and some push from greenhouse skeptics, Crichton sold a lot of copies. He even purports in an Addendum to his book to dispense advice on climate data monitoring and interpretation — enough to be called before the U.S. Senate as an expert on climate science by greenhouse skeptic Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, then Chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works.

In some ways it is too bad Crichton is flat out wrong — the satellite data he relies on so heavily to refute ground-based observation data turns out, in part because of problems with balloon-borne sensors, not to have been correctly calibrated. Evidence is coming in at a staggering clip that indicates greenhouse warming and societal impacts are occurring now a decade or more sooner than many of us in the climate protection community would have anticipated even three or four years ago. It would be nice if this were, as Crichton claimed, mostly hype and humanity had the luxury of pursuing business as usual and adapting over a long period to a very gradual warming. There are, however, very disturbing signs that we are dancing perilously close to a precipice and all the while wearing a veritable blindfold; we may not know it until we have passed a tipping point or stepped over a ledge.

We believe we have time to avoid a runaway or highly destabilizing greenhouse warming, but not if our leaders continue fiddling as sand pours down the hourglass. The good news is that by thinking smarter in building design, transportation planning, vehicle fuel systems, location of power, heating and cooling facilities and so many other things, we can create remarkable and even more equitable economic growth and at the same time curb greenhouse emissions. Not all of this requires a magic-bullet technological breakthrough. Twelve centuries ago in what is now Mexico the Mayans understood the use of passive solar and integrated this know how into building design and orientation. If we are to avoid forcing future generations to build de facto lifeboats or arks, we need to draw on some of this ancient wisdom as well as modern science.

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John C. Topping, Jr. has been President and CEO of the Climate Institute since its founding in 1986. From 1983-1986 he served as Staff Director of the Office of Air and Radiation of the US Environmental Protection Agency and in 1987 was Co-author of Clean Air Handbook, a book on US air pollution control law. He is the editor of two volumes on climate change: Preparing for Climate Change (1988) and Coping with Climate Change (1989). From 1989-1990 he served as editor of the portions of the IPCC First Assessment Report concerning impacts of climate change on human settlement, industry, transport, energy, human health and air quality, and on impacts of climate and UV interactions and as Lead Author of the portions concerning impacts on human settlement, industry and transport