Definitely Not Oprah's Book Club - "The Weather Makers"

Unless you have a strong science background much of the information you get these days about global warming can be perplexing at best. You're left in the position of grabbing a few snippets that seem believable and taking the rest of the premise on faith. Big Oil and Big Coal and their media lackeys have exploited that very weakness for years. Just listen to the nonsense that still comes spewing out of the mouths of the denialists - all of it faith based drivel.

But maybe you really want to understand what this is all about if you can find a way to do it without getting lost in indecipherable technical babble. There is a way. Get yourself a copy of "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery. Of all the books I've read on climate change, The Weather Makers is hands down the best. Flannery, who describes himself not as a "science writer" but a "writer scientist" manages to harvest information, gather it all together and present it in a way that is powerfully understandable. You read it, it makes sense.

For example, have you ever wondered how a kilogram of carbon in your gas tank turns into three kilograms of carbon dioxide at the tailpipe? It's because a molecule of carbon and a molecule of oxygen have very similar weights. The carbon molecule that emerges from your tail pipe bonds with two molecules of oxygen, creating CO2 that's about three times as heavy.

Here's a brief excerpt from the book that I hope will encourage you to get a copy of it:

"The twentieth century opened on a world that was home to little more than a billion people and closed on a world of 6 billion, and every one of those 6 billion is using on average four times as much energy as their forefathers did 100 years before. This helps account for the fact that the burning of fossil fuels has increased sixteen-fold over that period.

Jeffrey Dukes of the University of Utah [observed] ...that all the carbon and hydrogen in fossil fuels was gathered together through the power of sunlight, captured by long-ago plants. By calculating the efficiency with which we are able to retrieve that fuel, Dukes has concluded that approximately 100-tonnes of ancient plant life is required to create four litres of petrol.

Given the vast amount of sunlight needed to grow 100-tonnes of plant matter, and the prodigious rate at which we are using petrol, coal and gas, it should come as no surprise that over each year of our industrial age, humans have required several centuries worth of ancient sunlight to keep the economy going. The figure for 1997 - around 422 years of fossil sunlight - was typical. Four hundred and twenty-two years' worth of blazing light from a Carboniferous sun - and we have burned it in a single year."

"It makes me realise ...that the power and seduction of fossil fuels will be hard to leave behind. If humans were to look to biomass (all living things, but in this case particularly plants) as a replacement, we would need to increase our consumption of all primary production on land by 50 per cent. We're already using 20 per cent more than the planet can sustainably provide, so this is not an option.

In 1961 there was still room to manoeuvre. In that seemingly distant age there were just 3 billion people, and they were using only half of the total resources that our global ecosystem could sustainably provide. A short twenty-five years later, in 1986, we had reached a watershed, for that year our population topped 5 billion, and such was our collective thirst for resources that we were using all of Earth's sustainable production.

In effect, 1986 marks the year that humans reached Earth's carrying capacity, and ever since we have been running the environmental equivalent of a deficit budget, which is only sustained by plundering our capital base. The plundering takes the form of overexploiting fisheries, overgrazing pasture until it becomes desert, destroying forests, and polluting our oceans and atmosphere, which in turn leads to the large number of environmental issues we face.

By 2001 humanity's deficit had ballooned to 20 per cent, and our population to over 6 billion. By 2050, when the population is expected to level out at around 9 billion, the burden of human existence will be such that we will be using - if they can still be found - nearly two planets' worth of resources."

"The Weather Makers" - if you read one book on global warming this year, let it be this one.