Wake up and smell the burning

Now another volume has arrived, and one that goes a long way in explaining both the concept and the politics swirling around it, on all sides of the debate.

The author is Prof Joshua Howe, who teaches environmental studies at Portland’s Reed College, one of the most illustrious liberal arts colleges in the United States.

The title refers to the Keeling Curve – a graph that has been monitoring and plotting the ongoing change in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958.

This ever-upward trending curve is based on measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, and began under the guidance of world-renowned scientist Charles David Keeling.

The earliest measurements revealed the first significant evidence of increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Since those first measurements were taken 56 years ago, the response to his research has been sluggish, conflicting and fraught with complexities, both politically and on a practical level.

This book examines those complexities and much else. Particularly fascinating and insightful is the chapter on the 1950s Cold War roots of global-warming study, when, at times, the USSR enjoyed a modest scientific lead over its New World rival.

Despite the unambiguous science, effective and coordinated responses have not been forthcoming, and “manufactured doubt” spawns more research, especially by lobbyists of dubious partiality.

Howe traces United Nations efforts over the decades to develop a global response, efforts that have brought the developed and developing worlds into noisy disagreement over who should pay for mitigating global warming, and where responsibility for it lies.

The author’s insights into how individuals, institutions, and governments have produced a “too many cooks spoil the broth” scenario yields a disquieting narrative that does not bode well for the future.

So after more than a half-century of focused research, the ever-warmer global village has yet to really address the problem.

Why is this? The reason, Howe, posits, is a Gordian Knot of tangled international environmental politics, one that no single involved party has the power to slice through on its own.

Howe highlights the changing and morphing relationships between scientists, environmentalists and politicians over the duration of the curve’s existence. It’s a complicated matrix that makes the core problem all the harder to solve.

While the primary spokespersons for climate change are scientists, the primacy of science in global warming politics has failed to produce meaningful results for a variety of reasons expanded on through this book’s seven scholarly – and a tad dry – chapters.

All the while, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise. Last year, atmospheric CO2 had risen to 400 parts per million (ppm). In 1958, Keeling first measured CO2 at around 315 ppm.

How did we get to this point? “Behind The Curve” provides the answers. Most of them are based on that most human of tendencies – to muddle along, and let tomorrow take care of itself. Additionally, scientists have inadvertently rendered themselves impotent in this paradigm.

Fastidiously researched, the book contains no less than 72 pages of notes and biographical sources.

Howe has two overarching messages. We have managed to get the science right but the politics wrong. And remedying the problem will involve politics and economics as much as pure science.

There are no clear heroes and villains in this ongoing story, as Howe relates a more nuanced multilayered conflict, and one that is incrementally leading us to a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

Thorough and wide-ranging, this book’s readability suffers from its academic tone. Nevertheless, the tale it tells is a crucially important one – and life on Earth may depend on its outcome.

 

Behind The Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming

By Joshua P Howe

Published by University of Washington Press

Available at major bookshops, Bt1,273 (hardcover) 

Reviewed by Nick Walker