Skip to main content

The Planet Remade - Oliver Morton ****

We've had plenty of books on climate change - its impact, what we can do about it and so forth. But one of the aspects that tends to be treated very narrowly is that 'what we can do about it.' Specifically, solutions tend to be about reducing production of greenhouse gasses. But all the evidence is that this will not be enough, and that there will be a requirement for geoengineering - taking on active changes to reduce warming or to get carbon out of the atmosphere or both.

 Many green organisations don't like geoengineering, because they see it as more of the same - humans interfering with the environment which they should leave alone - but if you take a logical, rather than emotional approach, then some form of geoengineering will almost certainly be necessary.

 Oliver Morton makes a persuasive case for this in an odd book, which meanders between the factual and unnecessarily poetic in a way that readers will either love or hate. Considering the content, the book is far too long - padded out with an awful lot of prose that doesn't do much, often making tangential references to some kind of geoengineering activity. So, for instance, on the last page we get this paragraph:
Up above and far away, too far for any eye but the mind's, a future lifted on long, strong wings starts a graceful, cautious turn. It seems almost beyond the bonds of Earth, but it does not fly in freedom; there are things it cannot do and must not do - many ways for it to slip and fall. The future is hemmed in on one hand by its design, on the other by the unforgiving laws of nature. But its heading and height can, with skill, be changed.
What? Really? Haven't a clue, and that's 30 seconds of my life I won't get back. There is far too much of this meandering waffle, and were it not for the power of the argument when he does stay on topic, I would only give this book three stars. But, the fact is that when Morton does focus we get lots of great material on geoengineering. He spends a lot of time on modifying what he calls the 'earthsystem' by 'veilmaking' (as you may gather, he likes making up words, or using these neologisms if someone else dreamed them up) i.e. spraying material up in the stratosphere which will reduce incoming energy from the Sun and hence reduce warming.

 There is also a fair amount - probably the most interesting part of the book - on cloud science and manipulation of clouds and their impact on warming or cooling. By comparison, most of the methods of taking carbon out of the atmosphere get short shrift. Carbon capture and storage is, probably correctly, dismissed as simply not doing enough, and most of the mechanisms for taking carbon from the air at large are simply too expensive in money and/or land usage to be meaningfully deployed.

 I came out of the other end of the experience of reading this book convinced we ought to be doing more on geoengineering, but without a clear picture of the way forward, in part because of the obscurity of the writing. I think this book will delight someone who wants to get all touchy feely about the concept, but it left me wanting more. Even so, it is doing something that no one else has, and so is worth a try.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more