Snag Atmosphere Of Hope: Searching For Solutions To The Climate Crisis Authored By Tim Flannery Distributed As Volume

is a pacy and engrossing read, There is a story, with tenuous hope, but still with hope, Some possible solutions to help slow climate change are raised, They all require political will as well as dollars to be successful, There are some good examples of lobbying and advocacy, The science is very readable, and there are lots of references to additional resources, This is a book to read, think about and then take action,

I don't often read books as soon as they are released, there are usually good reasons to delay, like an every growing list of reading.
I am going to hear Tim Flannery speak tonight, and I thought reading this book before the talk was a good idea.
.stars. A concise and moderately upbeat summary of the current well, circastate of play, Ive been meaning to read one of Tim Flannerys books for a long time, I saw him give a talk at Melbourne Uni after the release of this book, where from memory he talked about the importance of “hope” in messaging and educating in climate change, and about many of the promising technologies currently being considered and developed.


Im already relatively strong on the science behind climate change I have a degree in climate science from Melbourne Uni, and I also recently read Naomi Kleins book “This Changes Everything”, which covers the political and social aspects of climate change in depth, but I was keen to read more about the technological side of things.


To start with, Flannery summarises the science of where things are at today, and how things have progressed or regressed, as the case may be since he wrote “The Weather Makers” in.
The way he writes is really accessible, you certainly dont need to be a scientist to follow, but its also really informative.
I also love the Australian focus, as having lived in Australia for the pastyears and having followed the politics and observed the environment here, it was interesting to learn the science behind it, and even to understand the effects of various government policies.
I recently read an article in “The Conversation” about Tim Flannery, where he was saying he thinks his lastyears of activism in the climate change area seem like a total waste of time because governments still havent acted! I feel frustrated by that the same thing, but given how hard Flannery has worked in this area, and how well he understands the climate situation, its hard to understand how frustrating it must be for him.
Im impressed he does still have hope!

Since studying climate change at uni, Ive also understood the dire situation the world is in, but in the back if my mind Ive always been comforted by a hope that technology will save us.
Given how slow the progress has been and were getting to crunchtime, Im getting gradually more concerned.
Though Ive been more concerned about the lack of political action on the matter there is so much more that could be done, and we already have the technology to solve the climate problem, if only everyone would behave in the right way!

The book was published in, and interestingly Flannery writes this about the Galilee Basin: “The really big play in coal was supposed to be Queenslands Galilee Basin.
The fate of the basins coal resources is of global importance because the reserves are so large that their development is incompatible with the goal of keeping temperature increases withindegrees Celsius.
” Page. As we have seen with the socalled “Adani” proposal, against all sense and rational argument, the project still just wont die.
And it still remains to be seen what will happen there,

After reading about the technological solutions on the table, my level of hope actually diminished.
I guess its normal to be initially optimistic, but then when you actually learn in detail about the situation, things arent so peachy.
Flannery does a great job of explaining how big the problem is, with the help of numbers.
He is convinced that weve missed the boat to avoid catastrophic warming just by reducing emissions, and we will actually need to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
He talks about how many gigatonnes of COwe release into the atmosphere each year, and looks at various technologies and their expected ability to be able to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Flannery calls these types of technologies “thirdway”, “because they are neither emissions abatement nor geoengineering, but a distinctive third approach” page.
He defines it as “Thirdway technologies recreate, enhance or restore the processes that created the balance of greenhouse gases which existed prior to human interference, with the aim of drawing carbon, at scale,

out of Earths atmosphere and/or oceans.
” Page. Even when these technologies are developed and scaled up as much as they practically can be, the amount of COthey can actually remove compared to the amount we emit is actually quite small.
We would have to develop and scale up a whole swathe of technologies to have much impact on removing COfrom the living carbon cycle, and this will presumably take a long time, when most of the proposed technologies and Flannery covers a wide range of them are still in their infancy.
Flannery has a good handle on these technologies, because hes part of the judging panel for Richard Bransons “Virgin Earth Challenge”, for which Branson offered amillion pound prize for the best entry for removing a gigatonne of carbon from the atmosphere.
For reference, we would need to remove about five times this much,gigatonnes of carbon annually to reduce COconcentration byppm and we would need to reduce concentrations byppm to return them to close to what they were before the Industrial Revolution.


I read this book at about the time of the global climate rallies instigated by Greta Thunberg in September.
I attended the Melbourne rally, along with around,,other people, from what I read, making it the largest rally every to take place in Melbourne.
There has been a lot of media coverage of the issue following these rallies, at least it seems to me.
There was great little video circulating from The Guardian afterwards, with Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot, where Monbiot cleverly says: “There is a magic machine that sucks carbon out of the air, costs very little, and builds itself.
Its called a tree!” Yep, Im confident trees are an important part of the solution, but as Flannery explains in his book, things arent so simple: “The option almost everybody thinks of when it comes to removing carbon from the atmosphere is to grow more trees.
Trees, like all plants, grow by drawing in CO, They are, in fact, little more than congealed atmospheric CO, with half of their dry weight being composed of carbon drawn from the air.
Many of the worlds forests have been cleared or degraded in recent centuries, so restoring them offered considerable potential for sequestration.
But the scale of reafforestation required to draw down a gigatonne of carbon is staggering,
Trees grow over a long time, and start out very small, so we must take ayear time horizon as we think about this option.
Over half a century, we would require an estimated,million square kilometres of land to be reforested,million square kilometres is roughly an area the size of Australia or the contiguous states of the US.
We would need to complete between,and,square kilometres approximately half the area of the United Kingdom of plantings each year, if we were to sequester on average a gigatonne of carbon annually for fifty years this way.
And the trees must be sustained for a century or more if the carbon is to stay out of the atmosphere for a useful period.
. .
As pointed out recently in Nature, reafforestation at this scale can have unintended consequences by changing Earths albedo.
Trees absorb more heat energy than do paler grasses, and this increase in heat energy captured at Earths surface may offset, or even more than offset, any gains in reducing temperatures made by drawing all of that extra carbon out of the atmosphere.
” Page

Its a fascinating book and Id love everyone to read it and inform themselves on the matter! Its not long, and its easy to read, certainly much easier than “This Changes Everything” was, at least for me.
Good on you Tim Flannery, much respect Ive gotpages left of this amazing and insightful book, but cant wait to recommend it to anyone who is conscious and concerned about our planet, climate change, global warming and what are really the causes, potential solutions.
The author gives a break down of layers of this issue I would probably only get if I were to take a University semester course on the subject.
Each time I read a paragraph, I feel like I am again at Uni, flexing my brain muscles and absorbing new and foreign knowledge to me.
Concisely written. Easy to read, but takes time to digest the information, I read it in portioned takes, A certain amount of pages daily or in between a few days of not reading from the book.
That worked best to integrate the new knowledge,

Now that I've finished the book, I can warmly recommend it to anyone who wishes to get better informed on various aspects and interrelated causes of global warming and climate change.
It's like you go through a course book for basics of understanding what has happened sinces until today or, when the book was published.
Also, you will get a very clear understanding of what the future prospects are for us, what fossil fuel is actually the least worse yes, there is one, and in what to invest when it comes to renewable energy sources or public policies to generate environmental sustainability and just secure our planet and our lives on Earth.
I care a lot about the environment and the issue of climate change but felt like I didn't know enough about it.
This book really helped me grasp a stronger understanding of the issue and provided some fascinating looks at ways humans might be able to combat the crisis none of which can work without also reducing the amount of COwe put into the atmosphere.
I should have read this when I first got as it has dated a bit already, Still a good read though and a good way to stay in contact with Australia's feeble attempts to meet its greenhouse gas targets.
Andrew Bolt's pathological hatred of Flannery even got a mention! One of the best things about this book is that it is so well referenced.
The bibliography has given me a few new titles to hunt down and read, Definitely worthwhile! Despite the title, I didn't find a good deal of hope here, But i'm glad i read it as I know so very little on this subject and really should know more.
I found it a good work in providing an introduction to this important topic though The rhetoric here is tight, and Flannery uses the logos/ ethos/ pathos combo with good effect.
A caveat: yes, climate change is undoubtedly occurring, but we need good rhetoric about it if we are going to convince the deniers.
And we need to convince them, or we are all doomed,
But Flannery may have focused too much on the rhetoric, and I think a lot of his points got lost in vitriol toward the climate change deniers.
He also does this annoying thing when he writes, whereby he introduces a new concept and talks about it before he tells you what the concept actually means.
This was infuriating, and he may lose a lot of readers who are climate change deniers as a result of this because they are obviously hesitant about absorbing new knowledge anyway.

In short, I don't think Flannery is an excellent writer, but he's good enough and has important things to say.

Anyway, I'm off to curl in foetal position on the floor and freak out: did I mention that this book doesn't actually instil much hope about the future Not much hope.
. . But just enough to work with, Because, when I am done freaking out, I will get up, and I will start making changes.
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