Name: The weather makers
ISBN: 9780871139351

The weather makers

"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 that has received patchy and misleading information on the subject. Pulling on his expertise as a scientist to discuss climate change from a historical perspective, Flannery also explains how it is interconnected across the planet." "Along with a history of how climate change has shaped our planet's evolution, Flannery offers specific suggestions for action for both lawmakers and individuals, from investing in renewable power sources like wind, solar, and geothermal energy, to offering an action plan with steps each and every one of us can take right now to reduce deadly CO2 emissions by as much as 70 percent." - jacket

What Hacker News says

shooAug 2015

That was a good read. Some related reading material:

Jared Diamond -- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed [1]. A historical analysis and discussion of past and present societies, and the multiple factors involved in collapse.

Tim Flannery -- The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change [2]. Includes a readable overview of the history of the earth's climate, and evidence of recent climate change (~2005).

Kerryn Higgs -- Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [3]. Higgs' book focuses on the history of how the philosophy of economic growth has come to be a dominant ideology in our civilization. This book roughly addresses the question of "why aren't we doing anything!?".

McKenzie Funk -- Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming [4]. Funk writes about the many exciting business opportunities created by the changing climate, including: the melting arctic provides access to new oil and mineral reserves, new markets for artificial snow makers now some ski fields lack natural snow, private firefighters employed by insurance companies to defend certain high-value homes, climate-based speculation of farmland, mosquito genetic engineering to suppress mosquito-transmitted diseases, ferrying boatloads of economic/climate migrants from africa to the EU, floating buildings, how to define a country's borders (and resulting claim to coastal natural resources) when that country is completely underwater.

Joseph A Tainter -- The Collapse of Complex Societies [5]. I have not read Tainter's book. I believe it roughly focuses around an argument that more complex societies require more upkeep to maintain them, and adding incremental complexity offers diminishing returns.

Graham Turner -- Is Global Collapse Imminent? [6]. A short research paper comparing the various simulated trajectories of the "Limits to Growth" modelling from the 1970s against data measured from the last 40 years of reality.

David JC MacKay -- Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air [7]. Almost entirely ignores economics and climate change to focus on physics-based back-of-the-envelope estimates to gauge how realistic it is to provide the UK's energy needs solely using the various forms of renewable energy.

Seneca -- Dialogues and Letters

  6.1.4-7 [the terrors of earthquakes]
  ...
  > There is no disaster without some means of escape. Thunderbolts
  > have never burned up whole peoples. A season of plague has
  > emptied cities, not carried them off. But the disaster of an
  > earthquake stretches far and wide; it is unavoidable, voracious,
  > and deadly to everyone. For it not only devours homes, families
  > and individual cities: it submerges nations and regions. Sometimes
  > it covers them in ruins, sometimes buries them in a deep chasm,
  > not even leaving any evidence that what is no longer there at least
  > once was. Only the ground covers the noblest cities, without any
  > trace of their former appearance.

[1] http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Collapse.html

[2] http://www.theweathermakers.org/

[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collision-course

[4] http://www.mckenziefunk.com/book

[5] http://monoskop.org/images/a/ab/Tainter_Joseph_The_Collapse_...

[6] http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M...

[7] http://www.withouthotair.com/

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SchwolopMar 2013

I've been re-reading Tim Flannery's 'The Weather Makers' again so perhaps I'm in a more pessimistic mood than usual. And yes, some places will become more habitable, but it seems fairly clear that these will be fewer in number than the areas that become less habitable. Not only this, but if (for example) all the areas that can currently grow wheat later cannot, but an equally large area subsequently can - we still won't be as well off as we are now due to the switching costs.

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