Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis

Flannery, author of the best-selling Weather Makers, which addresses what global warming may bring, revisits in this book the most important of these issues, and in addition, deals with ways that their deleterious effects can be ameliorated or even improved upon. He reviews the coal, gas, oil, wind, electric vehicle, and solar energy industries, ruminates on their futures, and offers a wealth of specific facts. Thus, he is an articulate generalist yet also provides particulars. Much of his description of methods to combat the buildup of CO2 and other chemicals is technical. Terms such as gigawat, albedo, cell grazing, biochar, anthropocene, the third way, and many others are explained when they first appear, but there are enough so that a glossary seems necessary. Also, some of the solutions Flannery proposes, such as seeding the entire stratosphere using an array of approaches, are so vast, complex, uncertain, and expensive that the reader may see them as fantasies, though granted, there may be no easy answers to the problems the author investigates.