4th Estate, £25
It was a rare delight to read Oliver Morton's Eating the Sun on Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago, a part of Norway only 600 miles from the North pole. Perfect for reading because it is mostly dark and will be so until spring, when the curtain goes up on the stage where the first act of global heating is being played out. Not long ago, the floating ice was thick from here to the pole and across to Canada; last summer 1m km2 of it melted, leaving 70 per cent of the Arctic ocean unfrozen in September.
Adverse climate change makes this a most important and timely book—not just for scientists, but for anyone who can think. Oliver Morton writes so engagingly that it reads as a well-crafted biography of the earth on behalf of the plant kingdom, tracing its evolution from tiny cyanobacteria 3.5bn years ago to the giant trees of today. Unlike a botanical text, Eating the Sun reveals the intricate chemical mechanisms by which sunlight is used by plants and how the sun powers everything that matters on earth.
Morton's book is also about earth science, my own Gaia theory and the lives of the scientists most involved. He explains why Gaia theory is still regarded as a heresy against orthodox science. From my viewpoint he is very fair, especially since many of his witnesses are passionate defenders of orthodoxy.
The wonderful thing about science is that nature itself is always the final arbiter. In time, Gaia theory will be confirmed or denied by evidence from the earth. Unfortunately, we do not have time. The evidence so far suggests that the earth is now in rapid motion towards one of its hot stable greenhouse states, perhaps like that of 55m years ago.
The key to understanding why the earth is growing too hot for comfort is to understand that it is in some sense alive. Morton clearly presents a vision of a living planet, albeit one that would appear eccentric to life scientists. Through this, we recognise that the earth is no mere ball of rock like Mars and Venus. When we change the carbon dioxide content of the air, the earth responds, when healthy, by neutralising our pollution—negative feedback. Now, less healthy, it responds by supplementing our increase with one of its own—positive feedback. The temperature increases rapidly with each addition of CO2 because, over a certain range, temperature and CO2 are directly related and soon the incremental heating from the earth itself will exceed our inputs and then further heating is unstoppable. Fortunately for us, earth history suggests that positive feedback will come to a natural stop and temperatures will stabilise five degrees above the present. The idea that we can stabilise rising temperature at some convenient level, say just two or three degrees above the pre-industrial norm, is probably the delusion of computer modellers. Once positive feedback starts, there may be little that we can do except try our best to adapt to a five-degree hotter earth. Hot enough to make our world a vast desert and starve most of us.
What makes this book so good is the way that Morton, as well as dealing with the issues, gives us portraits of the leading personalities. I was especially moved to be reminded of that rare figure Bob Spicer. Spicer is a real naturalist—one who wears muddy boots. Not one of those whose view is limited to a computer screen, like the environmental scientist who once said, "With a click of a mouse I can change the whole earth." What hubris—we fall in love with our numerical models as easily as Pygmalion did with his statue Galatea.
So it is with the forecasts and conclusions of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. They may come from the world's most talented climatologists using vast global climate models, but scientists themselves freely admit in private that, although they wish they could make their models real, they cannot yet include such important elements as clouds, the ocean and, most of all, the responding ecosystems. There has not been time to do this, nor the will, since they model a dead, not a living, planet.
A few good scientists bring us what Nasa calls "ground truth"—the solid facts we can rely on. Men and women like them grow rarer, as those who manage science believe that research money is better spent on modelling and brainstorming sessions than on messy and dangerous experiments and observations in some distant field. We are as tribally hierarchical as ever, but seem to have lost the checks and balances that were part of our earlier class-based society, one that scorned egalitarianism but welcomed merit. Here on Svalbard today, as in science, it is still too dark to see much beyond the lights of the base station.
