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Weather Makers | 
| Author: Tim Flannery
Publisher: ALLEN LANE (PENG)
Category: Book
Buy Used: $0.03
New (6) Used (19) from $0.03
Rating:  106 reviews
Sales Rank: 852669
Media: Hardcover
ISBN: 0002007517
EAN: 9780002007511
ASIN: 0002007517
Publication Date: March 2, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 101 more reviews...
 Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers April 16, 2009
Leah Goss (St. Peter, MN)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Tim Flannery takes the scary and curious words of global warming to a whole new level in his book, "The Weather Makers." The book is divided into many sub divisions that make the terms and concepts much easier to understand than if you would read the information as a regular book. Published for non-scientists and scientists alike, Flannery successfully appeals to nearly all audiences. This book could almost be considered to be a global warming encyclopedia as it covers all aspects of the before, during, and after effects of life here on earth and how humans are contributing to this.
Flannery takes the criticism that global warming receives, from those who believe that the changes are completely natural and that no severe precautions need to be taken, and channels them into the reality of the human effects of climate change. Currently, there is heavy physical evidence of the effects of the ocean temperatures increasing on marine life. Coral reef has been experiencing the most drastic effects seen yet with severe bleaching of many reef species. The coral is essential to marine life in countless ways and with the increase in bleaching and dying of the reef the ocean will be seeing even more dramatic effects very soon. The underwater effects will be quickly seen as above water consequences.
Flannery provided quite a lot of research on the topic of transportation as well as it is known to emit the second largest amount of carbon emissions. Following energy, transportation is without a doubt needing to be changed around the world. The new creation of ethanol gas made from corn was thought to help on the amount of emissions although it has seen little improvement on the topic. In fact, the amount of fossil fuels is takes to grow and harvest the corn to produce the ethanol gas hardly even shows a reduction in the emissions. What needs to be tackled is the switch to hybrid vehicles completely. This will reduce every person's individual carbon footprint and begin to make immense reduction of emissions. Flannery argues strongly that with the fast paced changes that are occurring today, the effects that we will soon see will not be delightful. Individual, societal, and governmental matters need to be taken to create an overwhelming response to this serious and not so pleasant situation.
 Pure garbage January 7, 2009
crystal (Powell, WY USA)
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book reflects a message about what I'm thinking is the author's own religious bias. It's garbage. No where does it even mention population control, overpopulation causing climate problems, the need for birth control, poverty amongst peoples with no birth control. It's wordy.
 Very interesting book August 9, 2008
Cristobal Galban Malagon
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I found it very interesting, is not a science book...I think this book is perfect if somebody wants to know anything about the climate change
Even with some failures, this is one important book May 8, 2008
mianfei
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Tim Flannery, well-known for his writing on the unique ecology of Australia, turns his attention to the pressing issue of global warming with "The Weather Makers". As the disappearance of the southern winter rain belt hit home in 2006, Flannery deservedly won an Australian of the Year award for exposing the continent's shameful record on greenhouse gas emissions.
"The Weather Makers" begins in a quite slow fashion with a look at past climate changes and how they have occurred. Flannery, in a very scientific manner, gives a very detailed account of how the Earth's climate evolved, and how scientists gradually found out the role of carbon dioxide in making the Earth habitable by increasing temperatures. He looks at these things in quite revealing detail and the goes on a journey through geological and human history to illustrate how humanity developed in an era dominated by long periods of very cold weather in which most of the unusually fertile land of Europe, North America and New Zealand was covered by glaciers. Flannery then looks, in very close detail, at how coal and oil were formed and shows, in remarkably simple and legible language, how fossil fuels form and explains why they are so rare in comparison with the present demand for them. He also shows, in quite simple language, how they burn and why they vary so much in their usefulness as fuels.
It is the last half or so of "The Weather Makers" that is really revealing and something that must be read by global warming sceptics and especially by those who are in doubt or overtly nervous about action. Flannery shows, contrary to popular belief, that climate moves as carbon dioxide increases from one metastable state to another, and that the changes - like the 40 percent drop in Melbourne rainfall in October 1996 - are quite abrupt and, as we are seeing in Australia today - extremely liable to be disastrous. His illustration of the declines in rainfall over southwestern Australia are especially noteworthy. Flannery also does a marvellous job of showing how species, especially in tropical mountains that are effectively cool "islands", global warming has already driven extremely old species like the golden toad to extinction through changing the level of the cloud layer. The very fact that such species have become extinct should, of itself, be enough to quash notions - still popular amongst the most fertile sections of modern humanity - that global warming is not real.
Flannery also writes an excellent section titled "The Great Stumpy Reef" about threats to the Great Barrier Reef from global warming and coral bleaching.
The last part of the book, which looks at the Kyoto Protocol, is however clearly the weakest part of the book. Whilst I do not question Flannery's point that there are a large number of vested interests controlling politics in Australia and the US that prevent public ratification of the Kyoto Protocol regardless of its ineffectiveness, I am still critical of Flannery for his failure to recognise that - contrary to conventional wisdom - Australia and the Republican states of the US do not belong to the same culture as the rest of the West. Rather, they retain a value system that disappeared from Europe a hundred years ago and from Blue America, Canada and New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s. I have no doubts myself that Australia would not refuse to take the most radical action on greenhouse emissions like eliminating car travel and coal power were it not for a rapidly growing and socially ultraconservative bloc of voters becoming the dominant force in its politics. Flannery, in contrast, never looks at public opinion in Australia beyond the stereotyped liberal view that the public is less conservative than government.
The rise of One Nation and Family First in Australia, and the number of conservative, climate-sceptic sites on the web form the US, should be proof that public opinion is actually more conservative than Flannery would like to believe. He also does not consider the serious question of what an increasingly ultraconservative Australian public will think when rainfall declines in Melbourne and Perth become even worse than they have already.
He also does not look at whether international bodies' failure the greater ecological vulnerability of Australia (which he ought more than anyone to have known about) idea of assuming equal reductions for all countries as the right way to reduce emissions radically wrong. I myself believe Australia should have been internationally targeted long before any efforts at dealing with any other nation's emissions were even considered.
Nonetheless, for all Flannery's failures on the cultural front, "The Weather Makers" is still a most impressive read packed with information to arm yourself against the climate change sceptics and to harden your views if you are in doubt.
The world of the racoon is coming April 20, 2008
Vladimir Menkov (Okanagan Valley, British Columbia)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
A few weeks ago, while visiting South Australia's Yorke Peninsula (the place where European settlers have cut the native mulga forest to plant wheat and barley... and later discovered that it does not always rain enough to grow wheat and barley), I stopped by a local public library looking for an interesting Australia book. As my luck had it, I picked two, from the same shelf: Tim Flannery's "The Weather Makers", and Tim Low's "Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia's Exotic Invaders". It turned out that these two books - both well written, well informed, and covering environmental subject of concerns to Australians as well as people worldwide - complement each other in some ways that neither author may have planned.
The heart of Flannery's book is a martyrology of species that have already gone extinct due to the climate change now in progress, or those likely to do so as the climate change (warming, reduction in precipitation, fog, or cloud cover) continues. As a biologist closely working with many rare and endangered species, and, on occasion, having a chance to discover a tree kangaroo species just to see it become extinct within a few years, Dr. Flannery no doubt is in a very good position to appreciate the danger brought by climate change to many plant and animal species, as well as the tragedy of their loss to the mankind.
As Tim Flannery's accessible and well-presented analysis of many extinction (or threatened extinction) cases shows, the extinct or doomed species are mostly those that are already on their last legs, due to the natural or human-induced causes. Some of them have lost most of their habitat during the last ice age, others during the warming that followed the ice age; some were extirpated from many areas when the Aborigines came to Australia with the spear and the firestick, others were helped to their grave by Anglo-Australians' bulldozers and ploughshares. As Flannery correctly emphasizes, it is the reduction and segmentation of suitable habitats that makes many plant and animal species especially vulnerable to climate change, as, with the wheat fields and housing estates in the way, they can't easily "move" from the northern to southern parts of their geographic province anymore.
Although that's probably not Flannery's conclusion, it seems to me that in many cases the impending loss of these species, while tragic for the world's genetic diversity, and for those small areas where these species do find the refuge now, their extinction won't affect the ecosystems as they currently exist throughout most of the world: there, these threatened species have already disappeared.
As the global temperature inexorably rises, what is coming to replace the doomed species and the ecosystems that they form? As Flannery suggest, many areas of the world are on the way to simplification or "uniformization" of sorts: the reindeer's and lemming's tundra may be replaced by the expansion of the moose's and squirrel's taiga forest; the polar bear's ice-covered Arctic ocean - with a seasonally ice free cold sea (similar to today's Bering Sea perhaps?); Amazonian rainforest, with a savanna of sorts. And to get a better idea of who *is* likely to survive in the new hotter world, Tim Low's "Feral Future" makes a good companion reader. It is all about creatures whose habitat, instead of shrinking (often, due to human activity), expands (often, not without human help). Widely adaptable, these species are likely to survive in the changing world, and likely even to benefit from the change sometimes, replacing the species that are losing ground. Forests of lantana and mimosa instead of the native species; rats and racoons instead of tree cangaroos; starlings and mynas instead of the native birds... this is what we are likely to see more and more, with or without climate change.
Read the two books together and think of what the future may hold. It may not be all that unpleasant - if, after some millenia, the climate stabilizes again, the now-worldwide starlings or racoons may undergo a new wave of speciation, developing new narrow-ecologic-niche species, replacing those that are disappearing now. It's probably not the first time this happens, on the geological scale: there must have been other global extinction events, followed by the appearance of new narrow-niche species, descending from the adaptable wide-nice survivors.
But in the present day, perhaps though the conservation biologists could pressure governments into funding captive breeding programs, to save some of the particularly threatened species for later reintroduction in the suitable environments - wherever those may be. Maybe we should be prepared to grow a new Great Barrier Reef around Tasmania, too :-)
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