The Weather Makers: How Man Is
Changing the Climate and What It
Means for Life on Earth by Tim
Flannery
Very Interesting Book
An international best seller embraced and endorsed by policy makers,
scientists, writers and energy industry executives from around the world,
Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers contributed in bringing the topic of
global warming to national prominence. For the first time, a scientist
provided an accessible and comprehensive account of the history, current
status, and future impact of climate change, writing what has been
acclaimed by reviewers everywhere as the definitive book on global
warming.
With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to
extinction by the levels of greenhouse gases that will accumulate in the

next few decades, we are reaching a global climatic tipping point. The
Weather Makers is both an urgent warning and a call to arms, outlining the
history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what
we can do to prevent a cataclysmic future. Originally somewhat of a global
warming skeptic, Tim Flannery spent several years researching the topic
and offers a connect-the-dots approach for a reading public who has
received patchy or misleading information on the subject. Pulling on his
expertise as a scientist to discuss climate change from a historical
perspective, Flannery also explains how climate change is interconnected
across the planet. This edition includes an new afterword by the author.
Personal Review: The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing
the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery
Tim Flannery, well-known for his writing on the unique ecology of Australia,
turns his attention to the pressing issue of global warming with "The
Weather Makers". As the disappearance of the southern winter rain belt hit
home in 2006, Flannery deservedly won an Australian of the Year award
for exposing the continent's shameful record on greenhouse gas
emissions.
"The Weather Makers" begins in a quite slow fashion with a look at past
climate changes and how they have occurred. Flannery, in a very scientific
manner, gives a very detailed account of how the Earth's climate evolved,
and how scientists gradually found out the role of carbon dioxide in making
the Earth habitable by increasing temperatures. He looks at these things in
quite revealing detail and the goes on a journey through geological and
human history to illustrate how humanity developed in an era dominated by
long periods of very cold weather in which most of the unusually fertile land
of Europe, North America and New Zealand was covered by glaciers.
Flannery then looks, in very close detail, at how coal and oil were formed
and shows, in remarkably simple and legible language, how fossil fuels
form and explains why they are so rare in comparison with the present
demand for them. He also shows, in quite simple language, how they burn
and why they vary so much in their usefulness as fuels.
It is the last half or so of "The Weather Makers" that is really revealing and
something that must be read by global warming sceptics and especially by
those who are in doubt or overtly nervous about action. Flannery shows,
contrary to popular belief, that climate moves as carbon dioxide increases
from one metastable state to another, and that the changes - like the 40
percent drop in Melbourne rainfall in October 1996 - are quite abrupt and,
as we are seeing in Australia today - extremely liable to be disastrous. His
illustration of the declines in rainfall over southwestern Australia are
especially noteworthy. Flannery also does a marvellous job of showing
how species, especially in tropical mountains that are effectively cool
"islands", global warming has already driven extremely old species like the
golden toad to extinction through changing the level of the cloud layer. The
very fact that such species have become extinct should, of itself, be

enough to quash notions - still popular amongst the most fertile sections of
modern humanity - that global warming is not real.
Flannery also writes an excellent section titled "The Great Stumpy Reef"
about threats to the Great Barrier Reef from global warming and coral
bleaching.
The last part of the book, which looks at the Kyoto Protocol, is however
clearly the weakest part of the book. Whilst I do not question Flannery's
point that there are a large number of vested interests controlling politics in
Australia and the US that prevent public ratification of the Kyoto Protocol
regardless of its ineffectiveness, I am still critical of Flannery for his failure
to recognise that - contrary to conventional wisdom - Australia and the
Republican states of the US do not belong to the same culture as the rest
of the West. Rather, they retain a value system that disappeared from
Europe a hundred years ago and from Blue America, Canada and New
Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s. I have no doubts myself that Australia
would not refuse to take the most radical action on greenhouse emissions
like eliminating car travel and coal power were it not for a rapidly growing
and socially ultraconservative bloc of voters becoming the dominant force
in its politics. Flannery, in contrast, never looks at public opinion in
Australia beyond the stereotyped liberal view that the public is less
conservative than government.
The rise of One Nation and Family First in Australia, and the number of
conservative, climate-sceptic sites on the web form the US, should be
proof that public opinion is actually more conservative than Flannery would
like to believe. He also does not consider the serious question of what an
increasingly ultraconservative Australian public will think when rainfall
declines in Melbourne and Perth become even worse than they have
already.
He also does not look at whether international bodies' failure the greater
ecological vulnerability of Australia (which he ought more than anyone to
have known about) idea of assuming equal reductions for all countries as
the right way to reduce emissions radically wrong. I myself believe
Australia should have been internationally targeted long before any efforts
at dealing with any other nation's emissions were even considered.
Nonetheless, for all Flannery's failures on the cultural front, "The Weather
Makers" is still a most impressive read packed with information to arm
yourself against the climate change sceptics and to harden your views if
you are in doubt.
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