Environment: The last two chapters of this book were written with the author's newborn baby daughter perched on his knee.
That arrival might explain the deadly serious nature and sombre intent of the book. Climate change is no longer an abstraction relating to other people, but something that will determine the type of world this little girl will inhabit. The recently released Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change has thankfully, at last, put the issue at the top of the political agenda, where it desperately needs to be.
The carbon released today takes time to reach the upper atmosphere, but once there, it stays for some 200 years. The link between greenhouse gases and the increase in global temperatures is now incontrovertible. The emissions already released make an increase of up to two degrees in global temperature almost inevitable. Some 150,000 people already die each year from the effects of climate change. We are already seeing increasing droughts, powerful new weather systems, changes to the PH balance in our seas and the rapid melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps. The crucial question asked by Monbiot is whether we have the political and individual will and the technology to ensure that climate change does not become a runaway phenomenon.
He outlines how an increase in temperature above two degrees would introduce what are known as positive feedback loops, where our natural systems start releasing rather than storing greenhouse gases. Recent scientific reports say the Amazon rainforest may already be threatened by increased temperatures and drought, which could lead to the forest dying off and the release of massive stores of carbon. Rising temperatures also risk melting the permanently frozen tundra in Siberia, which in turn will release quantities of methane, which will have an even more pronounced global warming effect. In August 2005 the first reports that such a melting has started were published in New Scientist.
Monbiot cites the Potsdam Institute in Germany, which argues we will have to curtail greenhouse gas levels in 2030 to no more than 440 parts per million parts of carbon dioxide, in order to keep global temperatures below that tipping point of two degrees' change. These emissions are close to what we are already releasing today. However, we will need to cut them by at least 60 per cent if we are to compensate for the increasing inability of our natural soil and ocean systems to take up carbon.
Given his premise that the right to emit carbon should be allocated fairly on an equal global per capita basis, Monbiot argues that the world's heaviest polluters, such as ourselves, will have to cut our emissions by 90 per cent in the next 25 years. This book is one of the first to investigate whether such a cut is possible and to honestly outline the possible consequences for a country such as the UK.
In searching for solutions, Monbiot is wonderfully sceptical of anyone with a commercial interest in the outcome. Any theory has to be backed up with proper peer-reviewed papers. He is also suitably scathing of those environmentalists who talk the talk but then fly the jet. He exposes the denial merchants, who have learnt lessons from the tobacco industry on how to spin confusion and throw doubt into a debate.
His goal is qualified by the assumption that we want to maintain our industrial civilisation and the comforts of modern living - but he is not afraid to come to stark conclusions where necessary. In most areas he shows how technological solutions are possible, but when it comes to aviation he sees no alternative but a radical 90 per cent cutback in the amount of flying we do.
His solutions are based on the premise that governments will have to be strong in regulating for necessary changes but he opposes a central planning solution to the problem. Instead he supports the work of Mayer Hillman and Aubrey Meyer and others, who have been calling for global cap and trade rationing systems, which would curtail the amount of carbon available while leaving people free to invent clever means of saving and using energy.
The book has 47 pages of extensive references. It covers in real technical detail likely new developments in our electricity, heating and transport systems. It is a remarkable research task. It ends with the assessment that, yes, we can make the necessary cuts, but only on the back of a unique new campaign that calls not for abundance but for austerity. The book is an instruction manual as much as an urgent manifesto for change. The alternative he sets out would be for us to engage in a Faustian pact, where we can live like kings for the next 25 years on the back of our remaining fossil fuels, but then be damned forever.
Eamon Ryan is a Green Party TD for Dublin South and is his party's energy spokesman
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning By George Monbiot Penguin/Allen Lane, 215pp. £17.99