Fire and Flood review – Has everyone forgotten about the climate crisis?

Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present by Eugene Linden (Penguin), £14.09.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter launched an initiative for the US government to invest heavily in renewable energy resources. This is the starting point for Fire and Flood, described by the author Eugene Linden as “a People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present”. Linden, a journalist now 75, has been pursuing this theme since a breakthrough article in Time Magazine in 1988. The book is a vigorous polemic — some of the argument is dense and not for the faint-hearted. It is not for the hardcore climate change sceptics. 

I don’t think it will change hearts and minds in that constituency. It does, however, form a handy guide to the milestones in the debate and discoveries into climate change and related environmental matters over the past 40 years. It gives good summaries of the science and the political debates and rows. But it is especially strong on climate journalism and how, at times, this has been poorly served in metropolitan and international mainstream media.

The opening fusillade of facts and statistics is loud and clear. The biggest burners of fossil fuels are India and China — the latter has quadrupled the emissions of Greenhouse Gasses — GHGs — since 1990, and between 1990 and 2010 China’s GHG emission topped that of all the other OECD countries put together.

Climate science per se has had slow acceptance, Linden argues, and mainstream media has been slow to pick it up. I recall returning from Antarctica in 1984 — from a work passage with HMS Endurance — to report to the BBC newsroom that British scientists out of Halley Station had found a somewhat worrisome hole in the Ozone layer, and this could be a big story. The editor, not known as a scientific visionary, grunted “sounds a bit overblown, leave it.”

I wrote up my trip to the southern oceans in a short book. It was damned with faint praise by my friend and two-times editor, Sir Max Hastings. He concluded his review with the immortal line, “Who cares about Antarctica, anyway ?”

Eugene Linden cares about Antarctica a lot, and one of his most compelling arguments in Fire and Flood is that we all need to think about Antarctica. The discovery of the hole in the Ozone layer by the team under Joe Farman was written up after three seasons and confirmed by NASA in 1988. It would take eleven years for the main culprit, CFCs, Chlorofluorocarbons, used in refrigerator manufacture, to be banned.

In 1995, the mighty Larsen A ice shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula broke up. The UN International Panel on Climate Change, then in its infancy, was shocked and had suggested earlier that the Antarctic ice shelves would be stable till towards the end of the 21st Century. 

In 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf broke up with little warning. Similarly, the oceans off Greenland were feeling the drastic cooling effects from the rapid melt of the Jakobshavn Glacier.

The great changes in Antarctica and the Arctic have been driving cycles of extreme, or “weird”, weather. Huge fires have become more frequent and destructive in Canada, California and Australia. Hurricanes queue up off the coasts of America. 

The permafrost of the tundra across Russia is beginning to melt, releasing methane in huge quantities and generating marathon fires. Linden is at his strongest describing the extremes of weather causing fire, tidal waves and huge cascades of rainfall.

In the Arctic and Antarctica, the drilling of shafts of ice core up to a mile and more deep reveal a fundamental but often overlooked truth about the climate debate, says Linden. They can show temperature fluctuation and changing conditions over the ages for many, many centuries. The revelation is that these are not gradual, smooth or linear. 

The early reports of the IPCC are classics of underwritten bureaucratic prose — as if deliberately designed not to frighten the horses and spark the coals of the climate debate in member nations — and suggest the melting of sea ice, for example, would be a slow and sedate process.

The ice cores suggest differently. Change can be dramatic, jerky and swift — the Little Ice Age, which began around 1300 CE, began, and then ended abruptly in a matter of a few years. The same can be expected now. 

This makes the arguments in international forums about setting zero-emission, and sustainable temperature increase targets especially tricky. The zero-emission dates discussed at the Paris and Glasgow COP conferences of around 2050 to 2060 seem quite arbitrary. 

It is unlikely that either India or China can wean themselves from fossil fuel power by either date — and at least India said so plainly at Glasgow.

According to Linden, a rise of average global temperatures of two degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial Age levels spells real trouble, and a possible three or even four-degree excess by 2100 means catastrophe for many parts of the world.

Not only does it carry a threat of coastal inundation but with it will come vicious spikes in temperature. Already parts of India, briefly last summer in Canada and frequently in Africa, areas have become impossible for human life — humans simply cannot breathe there. 

Dust storms in the Iraqi desert that used to blow for 30 days a year, now prevail for 300 days, according to the International Red Cross.

Though fascinated by glaciology and what it tells us, the author gives almost no attention to the glaciers, some 2,400 of them, of the mighty Asian mountain chains of the Himalayas, Hindu Kush and Karakorum, where a lot appears to be happening. The off- run into great rivers from the Indus and Ganges to the Mekong and Yangtse nourishes around three billion people. 

Some are melting by force, causing flood, drought and famine — and this seems to have been an important catalyst to the upheaval and chaos in Afghanistan these past three years. Some Asian glaciers are feared to be facing extinction within the next fifty years.

There is much focus on the politics of the climate debate — mostly from a Washington metropolitan perspective, and perhaps too much so. We have Republicans saying climate “is just a Democrat issue”, and Rush Limbaugh declaring that climate change is “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people.” 

They are joined by a Saudi diplomat who told a conference, “there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change.” Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian PM, puts the matter differently and more accurately when he wondered why “an issue of physics becomes an issue of identity and values.”

Fire and Flood pays surprisingly little attention to movements like Extinction Rebellion and even the activities of mainstream Green parties concerning climate change. Greta Thunberg is dismissed in a short paragraph. Both the Paris Climate Conference of 2015 and the Paris Accords get equally short shrift. They are mentioned in passing but with little analysis save noting their rejection by the Trump administration.

The book is an unfortunate victim of its publishing deadline. This has allowed for no mention of Glasgow COP26 and Cairo COP27. A second, updated and revised edition is urgently needed. This should allow the author to cover some conspicuous omissions. Though he rants about Trump and his supporters — often over matters unconnected to climate and the environment — he does not examine the religious or faith component in the polemics of many climate change rejectionists.

There is very little appreciation of the role of environment and climatic considerations in contemporary security, strategy and resilience postures and policy. Climate is central to future provisions for food and energy security and homeland resilience against storm, flood, fire and heat.

The story isn’t all gloom. The evolution of climate policies and strategy has been disrupted by the onset of Covid, and the upheaval in energy markets from the Ukraine war. But Covid brought innovation, ingenuity and cooperation in care, prevention, vaccine and medicines. 

There have been enormous gains in developing renewable sources of energy — an $11 billion industry in the US. America now gets a fifth of its electricity from renewables and Germany about 40 per cent. The insurance and reinsurance business is now beginning seriously to grasp the implications of the worst impacts of climatic shifts.

 Managing what’s in store requires goodwill, cooperation and a bit of that rare commodity, altruism. In a rather weak conclusion, the author seems to believe a world of democratic socialism, à la Bernie Sanders is the answer — though I am not sure if he means democratic socialism or social democracy.

This points out that Fire and Flood, like so much of climate debate itself, is a work in progress. Eugene Linden gives helpful guides and pointers but few answers. So, it’s up to all of us to engage with this awkward creature — our survival as a species could just depend on it.