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Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change, by Clive Hamilton, Earthscan, 286 pages, $25

The summer of 2010 was a tough one on planet Earth. It also should have discomfited climate change skeptics. This past summer, nine nations set all-time-high temperature records. Unprecedented monsoons and flooding left 20 percent of Pakistan submerged, the worst disaster in the country’s history. China suffered similarly devastating, if less widespread, flooding. Record-setting drought and heat across Russia ignited hellish fires that left Muscovites choking on acrid smoke that blanketed their city for days on end. The Russian wheat crop was severely reduced, and Moscow suspended grain exports for the rest of the year, possibly longer. Wheat shortages and soaring prices ignited food riots in Mozambique, providing a preview of future global disruptions in a changing climate.

Any good climate scientist will offer the disclaimer that no specific weather event can be directly attributed to climate change. Nevertheless, the striking pattern of extreme weather on display in 2010 fits perfectly with the predictions of climate change models, which show increasing incidences of extreme weather and widely varying effects in different regions. Some areas become drought stricken and arid while others become far wetter. This also lends credence to the assertion of the environmental writer Bill McKibben and others that the effects of climate change are upon us and that we now live on a planet significantly different from the one on which those of us of a certain age grew up.

Given this confluence of events and the close correlation to the predictions of climate scientists, one might have expected a blizzard of media coverage: long think pieces on what this portends for our future and how we can minimize the damage or adapt. A quick Google search shows just how wrong such expectations would have been. The tragedy of Pakistan went largely unnoticed and uncommented on, at least in the American media. The faltering global wheat harvest merited a few small items on the business pages but was otherwise similarly invisible.

What is going on here? A recent Pew poll shows that only 57 percent of Americans believe that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming, and only 36 percent believe that there is evidence the warming is related to human activity. A major gulf exists between American public opinion and scientific evidence. Contrary to popular belief, there is little to no debate among climate scientists that humans are the primary driver of climate change. Even among those who do believe in anthropogenic causes of climate change, there is a disconnect between intellectual acknowledgment of the reality of climate change and acceptance of the implicit consequences of that reality.

It is the gulf between acknowledgment and acceptance that Clive Hamilton explores in his new book, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change. Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Australian National University, argues that the gulf has two primary origins: the enormity of its consequences and the way it challenges how we as individuals and as societies have constructed our identities over the past three centuries. In doing so, he suggests that meeting the challenge of climate change requires far more than implementing the right policies and making minor adjustments in our lifestyles. Instead, it implies remaking our psyches and societies on a scale unseen since the dawn of the modern age.

Fundamental to this task is an understanding of the most recent climate research. Hamilton offers a competent and sobering, if somewhat skeletal, sketch of the present state of the science. Readers looking to delve into this in far more detail would be well advised to consult a recent book by NASA’s chief climate scientist, James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.

The dire nature of the problem can be summed up in a couple of numbers, 350 and 2. The former refers to concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Hansen maintains that we must keep carbon dioxide concentrations at or below 350 parts per million (ppm) to avoid the most serious consequences of climate change. We are presently at 387 ppm, and the rate of increase has accelerated alarmingly over the past decade.

The second number—two—refers to the average global temperature increase, in degrees centigrade, that the European Union has established as tolerable. The world currently is 0.8 degrees hotter than in preindustrial times and will hit 1.5 degrees warmer even if all carbon emissions ceased tomorrow. These numbers make limiting global temperature increase to only two degrees extremely unlikely.

Hamilton drives home the urgency involved by recounting his attendance at a climate change conference at the University of Oxford in September 2009. He recounts how the conferees, the most distinguished climate scientists in the world, discussed what a world four degrees warmer than preindustrial levels would look like. All believed a four-degree increase a quite reasonable median likelihood in this century, with anything but moderate results. Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, summed things up starkly: “The future looks impossible.”