Environment: When Tim Flannery began his prodigious research, there may still have seemed room for argument about the existence of global warming and the extent of human contribution to it, writes Michael Viney.
Today, the last particles of doubt are melting away like snowflakes and the approaching trials of humanity, along with much of the planet's wildlife, seem all too vividly certain. His book contains a postscript reporting "proof positive of global warming" published in the journal, Science, and it appears within weeks of another, The Revenge of Gaia, by Prof James Lovelock, that puts our carbon-spewing civilisation on final notice of reform.
Flannery is firmly committed to Gaia, the view of earth's atmosphere and skin of life as a planetary ecosystem that behaves much like a giant organism. Such belief does matter, he insists, "for it influences the very way we see ourselves in nature [ and] predisposes its adherents to sustainable ways of living". His early chapters explore the evidence for Gaian feedbacks and impacts that has mounted worldwide since Lovelock first produced his heretical theory in 1979.
Flannery is director of the South Australian Museum, a professor at the University of Adelaide, and also a dashing adventurer with a gift for popular writing. While the odd "whopping" and "mind-boggling" may strain a little too hard, his exposition of the way the world's atmosphere works and of current research into climate history is supremely readable and full of memorable facts, making jacket praise from Bill Bryson, Jared Diamond and Redmond O'Hanlon entirely appropriate.
The book's title, glibly fashioned, is matched to sombre findings that by 2050 human impacts on climate will have surpassed all natural influences. "In other words," as Flannery writes, "there will be no more climatic 'acts of God', only human-made climate disasters."
Hurricane Katrina came too late for inclusion, but there are quite enough ominous facts in the events and research up to 2004 to make us wonder, along with Prof Lovelock, why everyone isn't nearly scared enough. To be told that sea level is rising (so far) "only a fifth as fast as your hair grows" is only mildly reassuring.
Paradoxically, however, it's by no means a miserable read - just a deeply disquieting one. The author's delight in the intricacies of Gaia, and notably in the interplay of ocean and atmosphere, is more a celebration of natural wonder than any invitation to mourn. "Look at what we're messing up!" is Flannery's immediate message, followed by an often revelatory review of the curative, decarbonising options on offer.
As an Australian, he has sourly immediate examples of resistance to Kyoto. He tells how advice that it would be "more efficient" to evacuate small Pacific island states than to require Australian industries to reduce their emissions of CO2 has led to his government's coercion of islands such as Tuvalu into setting up plans for wholesale migration as sea level rises.
He delves knowledgeably into carbon dollars and worldwide schemes for "contraction and convergence", but it is his appraisal of the pros and cons of various technological fixes that strike most acutely. Nobody reading his assessment of the current technology will be left to chatter about an early solution through a "hydrogen economy". Not only does the present generation of hydrogen from natural gas release all of its CO2 into the atmosphere, but the logistics of getting hydrogen to fuelling stations, containing it in a car tank of practicable size and burning it safely are clearly of huge difficulty.
President Bush's new-born enthusiasm for "switchgrass" (a very tall grass native to America) as a source of ethanol production invites some practical sums. Such a crop would have to make up 20 per cent of all productivity on land - this on a planet already too well trampled by humanity. Flannery does show enthusiasm, however, for a new hybrid-fuel vehicle that generates electric power from wasted brake-energy, and even more for the potential of combustion-free vehicles powered by compressed air, the latter a new technology available for home generation with the use of wind-powered or solar- panelled electricity.
He agrees that "Lovelock has a point" in his heartfelt plea for expansion of nuclear energy programmes to stave off collapse of civilisation, but spends surprisingly few paragraphs on it, being largely content to recite familiar objections. Geothermal heat engages him rather more strongly, perhaps because a single hot rock body in South Australia promises to supply all of that continent's power needs for 75 years.
Flannery urges people power in persuading governments to act, and in taking the often simple home-based initiatives he spells out in a final chapter. The horrific but inevitable alternative to immediate action will be, he pictures, an Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control, with troops in green helmets patrolling all global emissions, not least of the kind that generate yet more millions of people.
Michael Viney is an Irish Times columnist and author of Ireland in the Smithsonian Natural History series.
The Weather Makers. By Tim Flannery, Allen Lane, 352pp. £20