It is a story worthy of Greek drama. Humanity discovers the secret elixir that will bring us prosperity on an unimagined scale, enabling the construction of fabulous cities, travel faster than the speed of sound, communications at the speed of light and the means to bring forth bounty from barren land. But just as we raise ourselves to these god-like levels, we discover that the potion is poisoned. By drinking it, we are upsetting the natural workings of the world in a way that will soon destroy the very basis of our civilisation.
There is one small voice of hope, however. We have discovered the secret just in time - and we possess both the knowledge and the power to neutralise the poison and make all well. All that is needed is for the world’s peoples to put aside their differences and work together for a common goal. In this devilish test set by the scheming gods, can we pull through? Can we make it?
What a subject it would have made for Aeschylus or Sophocles. Instead, we have a collection of lesser artists and thinkers who struggle to connect our dependence on oil, gas and coal with the coming catastrophe of climate change that threatens to reduce our wondrous creations to rubble.
In the past few months a slew of books has been published detailing the science of climate change, the effects of climate change, the problems caused by climate change, and the solutions to climate change. They have been accompanied by a series of works on “the end of the world”, loosely tied to the ecological disaster we are building up to. The parallel enthusiasm for books on “peak oil” - the theory that the world’s fossil fuel resources have begun to run out or will soon do so - ranges from the learned to the crazed. A smattering of business books also promises to help entrepreneurs take advantage of all these trends - well, someone must stand to gain out of the end of everything.
Cataclysm has never been far away from the thoughts of mortals, as Simon Pearson recounts in A Brief History of The End of the World. This is an entertaining, though superficial, romp through “end-time myths” from the Flood through the early Christian mystics to the visions of nuclear Armageddon that invaded our nightmares last century. Pearson marshals a convincing breadth of examples to show how pervasive this idea is, with some brief thoughts on why it may be such a deep-seated psychological need.
He brings the history of doom merchantry up to date with an account of the apocalyptic overtones of George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, which, the author seems to think, is a more likely source of destruction than global warming.
The crucial difference between global warming and the older myths of destruction is the “emphasis on human instrumentality”. Contrasting the scientific consensus with the religious views of the current president of the US, Pearson notes: “There will be no Noah’s ark to save us from rising sea levels, no pre-tribulation Rapture which will spare us the worst of the environmental catastrophe, no divine intervention to replace the old earth with a new one... it is governments and ordinary people who must act and act now. Only then can disaster be averted and the planet saved.”
For all its death and destruction, Pearson’s short book is a cheery read, mainly thanks to his determinedly jolly tone.
But a more apocalyptic cover could scarcely have been devised for Fred Pearce’s latest work on environmental disaster. With a dark red brooding shot of the New York skyline under a glowering sky about to be engulfed by flames, and embossed lettering melting on to the page, The Last Generation looks like a typical thriller. It will come as quite a shock for people who pick this up in airport departure lounges to find it is not a page-turning whodunnit, but a passionately argued scientific treatise on “how nature will take her revenge for climate change”.
Pearce is a well-respected environmental journalist, a former news editor at the New Scientist and currently its environment consultant. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of current and past scientific thought on climate change, and his book is as thoroughly researched and tightly argued as his qualifications would suggest.
For those who already know something of climate change, this book provides depth and breadth of detail, such as a discussion of whether the tropics or the poles are more important in driving the earth’s climate. But even those with no previous knowledge of the subject will find it easy to keep up - Pearce orders his arguments intelligently, and presents them in terms the lay reader should easily digest (he particularly relishes the term “megafart”, used to describe a great outpouring of methane from the ocean 55 million years ago).
The premise is simple. In the two decades or so since climate change began to be taken seriously, it has been regarded as something that would happen slowly and gradually. A steady rise in temperatures would end up melting the poles and raising sea levels in 60 to 100 years or so. Wrong, says Pearce. The earth’s complex systems of climate, ocean circulation, weather systems and chemical reactions are not so lightly defied. They are extremely sensitive to even slight changes.
The complacent like to quote the 0.6øC rise in temperatures that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution, taking it as proof that we can cope with more warming. Pearce argues that even minor meddling with the climate will have dire results, which will bear down upon us as soon as the next decade or so rather than comfortably ambling up in a century’s time. The Last Generation of the title is us, we who are adults today.
Climate changes have never happened gradually in the past, Pearce says, but in wild swings and lurches from ice age to warmth. There is no reason to suppose human-wrought climate change will be any different, so prepare for a bumpy ride. Pearce quotes one expert who compares the earth to a drunk - stable while sleeping but if woken given to random violence. We are now poking the drunk with a stick, he warns. Pearce piles theories and evidence to show that we are in danger of pushing the world through various tipping points of temperature and greenhouse-gas concentration. These make runaway climate change with devastating consequences all but inevitable, he says, from inundation to desertification, including the failure of the Asian monsoon and the transformation of the Amazon to a desert - even if we stopped burning fossil fuels immediately, we may already have passed the point of no return.
But this relentless roll call of disaster engenders a certain resistance in the reader, a bit like the resistance that most of us feel towards doomsday cults. The science should indeed alarm us, but Pearce seems in danger of losing the reader by his insistence on the most extreme interpretations and scenarios. Reading it feels like being bludgeoned slowly into agreement.
Compounding this problem, Pearce is badly let down by his publishers, who have omitted to include any graphical material save one lone diagram. It’s a shame, as illustrations would make it easier to explain some of his more complex arguments and keep track of the confusing range of data we are expected to remember.
No such criticism can be made of Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth. Here, no graph is left unplotted, no map unreproduced, and no illustration is too insignificant to be excluded. The text suffers badly as a result, squeezed in dribbles and chunks in various fonts and point sizes into the few spaces available after yet another hurricane picture has been put in.
Do not think about trying to read this book in one go. Leave it around your house to show that you care - you may even dip into it from time to time. Read a few nuggets and look at a few pictures (the disappearing glaciers are the best) while you wait for Armageddon. To be fair, the book accompanies the film of the same name. It will make more sense to someone who has seen the film, which is surprisingly good and a more gripping viewing experience than the thought of almost two hours spent at a slide show given by a politician might suggest.
Wherever arguments about climate change are rehearsed, children cannot be far behind. Every “green” at some point appeals to our sense of obligation towards the younger generation to spur us into action on greenhouse gases. And now, finally, children have their own climate change book so they can see for themselves the horrible things that are going to happen to them - and for which their parents are mostly to blame.
The North Pole Was Here was written for children but can also be enjoyed by adults. Part adventure story and part science book, it is an engaging account of Andrew Revkin’s visit to the top of the world as part of an expedition investigating global warming. Mixed in are some of his reports (some rather simplified) on climate change from The New York Times, where he is environment reporter. The earth’s poles have warmed several times faster than other regions, and it is here that the most dramatic effects of climate change can be seen. Readable without being patronising, the book explains the key concepts behind climate change through the polar lens, and describes the history of Arctic exploration from the 19th century to the present.
Most readers will want little to do with The Chaos Point by Ervin Laszlo (Piatkus, ₤9.99). Presenting us with a choice - “breakdown or breakthrough” - to be made within the next decade, the book posits that the end of the world will come through a combination of our greed, environmental degradation, terrorism and smoking.
Dotted with facile fables and warmed-over platitudes, the book suggests meditation and “an altered state of consciousness” as part of the answer to keeping the world turning. Reading it certainly had me reaching for the means to an altered state of consciousness, but not through meditation.
The business reader may have more luck with Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston’s Green to Gold (Yale University Press, $25), a manual on how to turn your company into an eco-success, catching the current wave of consumer and government interest in saving the world from environmental catastrophe.
The prospect of Armageddon is one that is revived by every generation, recreating its fears in its own image, a process that springs partly from the same impulse that makes us scare ourselves with ghost stories. This does not mean disaster will not happen, however, and there is no shortage of current candidates - I prefer climate change, but you may choose bird flu or terrorism. But books about Armageddon tend towards the breathlessly portentous or the bludgeoningly boring. I suppose it was too much to ask for the end of the world to be fun.
Fiona Harvey is the FT’s environment correspondent.
A Brief History of The End of the World: Apocalyptic Beliefs from Revelation to UFO Cults
by Simon Pearson
Robinson ₤8.99, 320 pages
The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change
by Fred Pearce
Eden Project Books ₤12.99, 352 pages
An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It
by Al Gore
Bloomsbury ₤14.99, 336 pages
The North Pole Was Here: One Man’s Exploration of the Top of the World
by Andrew Revkin
Kingfisher Publications ₤9.99, 128 pages
