During the past several weeks I have been reading, with a racing pulse, some recent literature on global warming while watching, with a sinking heart, the political skirmishes connected to the introduction of the Rudd government's emissions-trading scheme. The experience of moving between these parallel universes has been genuinely disconcerting.
Perhaps the two most outstanding books on global warming to have been published lately are The Hot Topic, written by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King, until late 2007 the chief scientific adviser to the British government, and David Spratt and Philip Sutton's Climate Code Red. Were I a philanthropist, I would purchase several hundred copies of both and send them to our politicians and policymakers. As I am not, the best public service I can offer is a brief summary of their central arguments.
According to both books, there are many differences of opinion among scientists on many aspects of global warming. However, on one fundamental point there is now near unanimity: the massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, through the burning of fossil fuels that have been buried under the Earth's surface for hundreds of millions of years, is the main cause of a rise in the global temperature of 0.75° Celsius in recent decades. In the pithy words of Walker and King, "if anybody tells you differently they either have a vested interest in ignoring the scientific arguments or they are fools."