Climactic climatic change | |
Climate change. Turning up the heat. A Barrie Pittock. Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2005 (viii + 316 pp). ISBN 0 643 06931 3. |
This is no doomsday book.
Rather, it is a compilation of hard scientific data that the author uses to make projections about the sort of world our children and grandchildren will be living in in the future. Climate models are based on various types of human behaviour extending from “business as usual” to a scenario with reductions in material intensity and the introduction of clean, resource-efficient technologies. The “business as usual” scenario predicts an increase in extreme climatic events during this century. Worst hit would be low latitude countries. Flooding due to sea level rise, increased hurricane activity, and storm surges would displace millions of people on the Indian subcontinent. Australia and New Zealand would be obliged to take refugees. None of the Western nations are immune to the effects of climate change. The United States is particularly vulnerable. To quote from the book, “The city of New Orleans already lies below sea level and could be drowned by a combination of river flooding, storm surge and sea-level rise” (the book was already in the hands of the printer at the time of Hurricane Katrina). Difficult for the layman and politicians to understand are the long lag times in the climate system. Warming that has already occurred has set in place an irrevocable chain of events such as coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef, decreased snow fall on the Australian Alps, melting of the Greenland ice cap and the permafrost in Alaska, and breaking up of ice shelves in the Antarctic. The chapter on mitigation gives courses of action to limit global warming and offers some reason for hope (the author’s original title was Climate change: turning down the heat!). Intriguing is the potential of developing countries to “leapfrog” the industrialised nations by adopting clean technologies and achieving sustained economic growth without the pollution that characterised the Industrial Revolution in Western countries. The author, a world expert on climate change, has researched outside his field to analyse the socio-economic effects and health impacts. The book contains a comprehensive index and bibliography, and detailed notes can be accessed via a website. Robert M Hare
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