Monbiot and deep dilemmas.

• Author: Orton, David
• Position: Heat: How To Stop The Planet From Burning by George Monbiot - Book review

Heat: How To Stop The Planet From Burning, by George Monbiot, Doubleday Canada, 2006, 277 pages, hardcover, ISBN-13: 978-0-385-66221-5

What I hope I have demonstrated is that it is possible to save the biosphere.--Monbiot, p. 203

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.--Upton Sinclair, cited in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, pp. 266-267.

I recently read George Monbiot's latest book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Monbiot is an interesting fellow. He is one of the climate change gurus who are widely discussed, and he is a person of the Left--a progressive journalist, unlike Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth) or Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers). Also unlike Tim Flannery, Monbiot has little sense of ecology. Another of Monbiot's books Manifesto for a New World Order (2003), has as its overall thesis that we should take over and democratize globalization. Local self-sufficiency was considered negatively, and at that time he supported carbon emissions trading. Monbiot now seems to have softened this support and gives an informative and very critical examination of the European Emissions Trading Scheme as "a classic act of enclosure." (pp. 46-49).

Monbiot is someone who has made the intellectual effort to go through the climate change literature for the United Kingdom. He also looks at the proposed technological solutions to the climate change problem and tries to see whether or not the proposed solutions are possible or if they are illusions. He points out that we should look critically at anyone writing about climate change who has something to sell and thus has an economic interest. This corresponds with the sentiment of the Upton Sinclair quotation given above in Al Gore's book. We have to take this book very seriously indeed.

As most of us know, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have risen from 280 parts per million to 380 parts per million today. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is forecasting a rise in global temperatures of between 1.4 degrees and 5.8 degrees this century.

We know this is a "compromise" figure in order to get the most polluting states to sign on. Scientists who are directly involved and who are speaking out, seem to be saying that the climate change crisis is much worse than the official view given in the Intergovernmental Panel, and with potential "feed back" mechanisms which make the forecasting of rising temperatures a...