The Weather Makers: How We Are Changing the Planet and What it Means for Life on Earth

Summary

Sometime this century the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all other natural factors. Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Niño ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in two hundred years, the hottest European summer on record (which killed twenty-six thousand people in two months), the first South Atlantic hurricane, and one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced to date in Florida. With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to extinction by the levels of greenhouse gases that will accumulate in the next few decades, we are now reaching a global climatic tipping point.

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 mis-leading 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 riveting history of how climate change has shaped our planet’s evolution, Flannery offers specific suggestions for action for both law makers 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.

Already credited with changing the Australian government’s stance on global warming, The Weather Makers is the most ambitious book yet written by a world-renowned scientist on the greatest crisis facing the twenty-first century.