REQUIEM FOR A SPECIES

Subtitled 'why we resist the truth about climate change', the title says it all. Are we in fact doomed? Even Lord Rees, the immediate past President of the Royal Society, surmises that our chances of surviving the 21st Century are 50:50. And his predecessor, Lord May, endorses the book as a powerful statement of the problems confronting us, including our own psychological make-up. Climate change involves the interface of scientific, economic and political systems, but the starting point has to be the science. Here Hamilton argues that the news gets worse with every advance in climate science and reports a conference held last year in Oxford and attended by 100 climate scientists. Speakers noted that the extreme scenario of a 4-degree rise in temperature is now becoming more likely and that 'the future looks impossible.' Even a planet 2.5 degrees warmer means that most of the ice eventually melts (The Arctic first then Greenland), including the Himalayan glaciers that supply the summer run-off to rivers on which 1 billion depend. Some estimates put this date as near as 2030. These tipping points involving positive feedback loops make it hard to envisage that we can afford to overshoot carbon concentrations of 450ppm or more and subsequently hope to stabilise the climate.

Some readers may have read Mike Hulme's review of this book in the latest Resurgence, where Hamilton is characterised as a fundamentalist eco-prophet with a message of 'unrelenting pessimism and despair.' (Hulme is Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia). Hulme is less certain about the validity of science's predictive claims and more optimistic about our creative capacities, but both of these critiques need to be related to specifics. Incidentally, Hulme shares much of Hamilton's critique of the shallowness of the consumerist self and the fetish of economic growth; growth itself is predicated on discontent and is meant to lead to happiness, but this correlation is now widely questioned. The fact remains, though, that we are in a 'long emergency' situation in ecological systems (including climate change) as they relate to the current short-term orientation and preoccupation of our economic and political systems. A sense of scientific urgency meets political sluggishness and action is postponed even if implementation of precautionary measures is cost-effective in the longer term, according to Lord Stern As we have seen, recession further erodes political will and the Planet was scarcely mentioned at the recent G20 summit in Seoul.

A key component of Hamilton's analysis is our capacity for denial. We tend to pay attention to information corresponding to our existing beliefs and associate with those who agree with us; correspondingly, we avoid dissonant information and people. A fascinating component of climate scepticism in the US is its association with right wing thinking, which sees environmentalism and the science associated with it as a threat to the idea of progress and human mastery of nature. Frederick Seitz, a past President of the US National Academy of Sciences even went as far as saying that most scientists are Democrats, as if this was an explanation of their views. Surveys show that 76% of Democrats believe that the effects of global warming have already begun against 42% of Republicans. To the extent that environmentalists and climate scientists call for further regulation, they are seen as enemies of private enterprise and individual freedom. Seitz and others depict global warming as a form of politically-driven panic-mongering, which Hamilton characterises as a 'consciousness-lowering' activity.

In a section entitled 'the mendacity of hope', Hamilton muses that a healthy illusion has now become an unhealthy delusion and that optimism cannot be sustained against the facts, which for him include unfounded beliefs in the power of consumer action and technological rescue. Hope is usually expressed in the final chapter of environmental books after a dire analysis of the challenges we face. But this hope is conditional on action being taken, which does not normally happen for reasons already discussed above.

A further cultural factor militating against taking climate change seriously is the disconnection from nature endemic in our mechanistic and technological worldview. Hamilton traces the development of this mentality from the 17th century, and sees the advent of the Gaia hypothesis as part of the rebirth of Nature, with the caveat that Jim Lovelock's Daisyworld experiment is in fact underpinned by the idea of mechanism. A further source of disconnection is the highly individualised sense of self which is defined by separation rather than connection.

So is there a way out of the climate change impasse? We hear a lot about carbon capture, but this will not be fully operational for 20 years. Renewable energy sources can mitigate some effects if combined with aggressive energy efficiency measures. Can we engineer the climate? Sulphate aerosols injected into the upper atmosphere have been suggested but they would whiten the sky and could not be discontinued; the truth is that we cannot anticipate all the effects of such technologies.

So the stark prospect, if we agree with Hamilton, is that climate disruption will lead to the collapse of the foundational beliefs of modernity- 'the unlimited scope of human achievement, our capacity to control the world around us, our belief in the power of knowledge to solve whatever discomforts us.' We have been collectively guilty of what the Greeks called hubris, the overweening pride that comes before a fall. This is a shocking proposition, that the world will not continue to improve during the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren as it broadly has for so many people in the last hundred years. If we are tempted to despair, then this should spur us on in our efforts to revive and extend democracy as a counterweight to established interests looking mainly to the short-term ('influence has replaced representation'. Online petition sites as a force for mobilisation are a start but the recommendations are all too often ignored.

Your interpretation of this book, and indeed of this review, will owe much to your prior thinking about climate change and its implications, but the book will oblige you to face some uncomfortable facts and trends. Have we left things too late? Quite possibly, but in any event there is a mounting sense of urgency that we need to find a way of changing course if our ecosystems are to be sustained into the next generation.