Weaver - Keeping our cool: Canada in a warming world

Praise for Keeping Our Cool

Colourful and outspoken academic [Andrew Weaver] gives a sobering account of climate change and includes colourful commentary on the increasingly wacky weather.Edmonton Journal

At last, a look at climate that is accessible, fascinating, and ultimately, a call for action. Over the past century, humanity has become so powerful we are altering the chemical makeup of the atmosphere. Keeping Our Cool is an insiders story of climate change. Andrew Weaver is a distinguished scientist who has been a major contributor to the Nobel prizewinning work of the IPCC. Beset by naysayers and skeptics, pressures from corporations and laggard politicians, Weaver keeps us focused on the science and the urgent need to act. A gripping narrative, this should be the final alarm that galvanizes us to move onto a different energy path of renewables and efficiency.David Suzuki, founder, The David Suzuki Foundation

Weaver is one of Canadas most influential thinkers on global warming, an expert on how oceans shape climate.The Globe and Mail

Keeping Our Cool is a wonderful gift from a premier climate scientist to the rest of us. In the most reader-friendly prose, Andrew Weaver explains clearly and honestly what scientists doand do notknow about our overheated planet. Andrew Weaver has given the rest of us a great gifta clear, non-forbidding tour through the current state of climate science. Keeping Our Cool acknowledges our deepest fears even as it respects our intelligence.Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat Is On and Boiling Point

[Keeping Our Cool presents] lucid science explaining the history of our understanding of climate change and the state of the knowledge today Its a shocking tale [As Weaver] explains successfully in this valuable book, global climate change is real, and it will have dire effects on human civilization This book holds out a real chance of taking another crucial step to turning things around.Canadian Geographic

Weaver answers the otherwise confusing questions of climate change with confidence and clarity. As this book demonstrates, Weaver is not just one of the worlds foremost climate modellers, hes a great communicator.James Hoggan, chair, The David Suzuki Foundation and founder of DeSmogBlog

There are diagrams and tables to present graphically what [Weaver] admits is an inherently complicated truth. But this has always been one of Weavers strengths. Without ever dumbing the issue down, he keeps it as simple and understandable as he can.The Vancouver Sun

From Canadas top climate scientist, a vastly informative, deeply personal, and truly moving account of the climate crisis racing toward us. Writing with elegance and precision, Weaver takes us on a journey through global warmings complex science to show us how Earths climate works, what we know (and dont know) about how were changing it, and why these changes are of urgent concern. Throughout this journey, Weaver remains optimistic that we can still solve this problem, and he offers a host of suggestions for practical policies by governmentsand for steps we can all take at hometo protect our childrens and grandchildrens future.Thomas Homer-Dixon, Cigi chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and author of The Upside Down and The Ingenuity Gap

Weaver outlines in a comprehensive way what climate change is, why its real, what causes it, and what obstacles politicians and industrial interests place in the way of countering it.Ottawa Citizen

It is crucial that Canadians understand the stakes in the climate debate, and Andrew Weaver has both the credentials and the straightforward style to get that job done. This is a necessary book.Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and The End of Nature

PENGUIN CANADA

KEEPING OUR COOL

DR. ANDREW WEAVER is a professor and Canada Research chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria. A lead author in the Nobel Peace Prizewinning organization Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Weaver recently won a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Victoria with his family.

ANDREW WEAVER

KEEPING

OUR

COOL

CANADA IN A WARMING WORLD

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008

Published in this edition, 2010

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Andrew Weaver, 2008

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Weaver, Andrew, 1961

Keeping our cool : Canada in a warming world / Andrew Weaver.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-14-316825-6

1. Global warming. 2. Climatic changesCanada.
3. Greenhouse gas mitigationCanada. 4. Environmental protectionCanada. I. Title.

QC981.8.G56W42 2010 363.738740971 C2009-906280-1

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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To David, Maria, and Helen

Illustrations

Illustrations

Tables

Introduction

A Change in the Wind

BEFORE HEADING OFF TO FRANCE and Greece for a one-month family holiday, I had a few things to clear up at my office at the University of Victoria. It was one of those relatively uneventful workdays: I dealt with myriad emails, mostly academic spam; found reviewers to assess submissions to the Journal of Climate, a scientific journal for which I am the chief editor; responded to a local reporters questions about the adequacy of current carbon dioxide emission reduction targets; and met with two graduate students who were about to submit their masters theses.