Heliophage

As of today, November 3rd, The Planet Remade is available in America, from Princeton University Press, as well as the UK, where it’s published by Granta (Amazon UK|US, Google Books for other sellers). Here’s a tally of reviews so far.

Kirkus gave it a starred review:

Once dismissed as the province of cranks, geoengineering approaches to climate change have gained new respectability…An important account of cutting-edge research that will fascinate serious readers and demand the attention of policymakers.

Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times (£) found it:

Ambitious, enthralling and slightly strange.

(He locates the strangeness partly in an avoidance of gosh-wow science about mirrors in space)

Jane Long in Nature (which I thought was paywalled, but seems not to be) says:

If you are going to read one book on climate engineering, it should be The Planet Remade… The Planet Remade is as much an exploration of science and engineering as it is of people and attitudes… [with] insight gleaned from knowledge of the natural world, social thought, literature and science fiction, science and politics, scientific history and the scientists making that history…For a potentially harrowing topic, serendipity and fun abound.

Robert Mayhew in The Literary Review is thoughtful and positive, but not unreservedly so in that he thinks I avoid “the deeper political and moral questions” (I differ on this):

Morton is a cautious cornucopian about the potential of geoengineering. From his perspective, we have over the past century made massive strides in our understanding of the earthsystem. Indeed, one of the most interesting elements of The Planet Remade is that it offers fragments towards a history of our understanding of how the earth’s climate functions, which hopefully Morton may consolidate in future writing. Emerging from this historical approach is the most arresting and interesting claim in the book: rather than imagining geoengineering as something new, hubristic and Promethean being devised in the face of impending climatic Armageddon, we ought to recognise that humankind has been geoengineering for decades and that over the longer term it has been a normal part of modern societies. The main distinction of today’s geoengineering is that it offers the potential to make interventions in the biogeochemistry of the planet in ways that are more sensitive to the functioning of the earthsystem than ever before.

To make good on these claims, Morton shows us in the second part of the book that we have made huge adjustments to the carbon, sulphur and nitrogen cycles of the planet.

And here’s Robin McKie in The Observer, combining his review with one of “Atmosphere of Hope” by Tim Flannery (Amazon US|UK), using the frame of the Paris conference to get to the heart of the matter:

Only by actively limiting solar radiation and by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can we hope to curtail temperature rises, [Morton] argues. This is the science of geo-engineering and it is controversial because such projects – which include spraying sulphur particles in the upper atmosphere to cut out sunlight – risk worsening, rather than improving our world. Morton is no zealot, however, and his arguments are intriguing and persuasive.

My thanks to all the reviewers for engaging with the book so thoughtfully. As more reviews come in I will either lengthen this post or do some separate ones to which I will link here.

I’ve done various interviews and discussions related to The Planet Remade (Amazon UK|US, Google Books for other sellers) : this post collects the links, should anyone wish to listen.

Here’s an interview that went out on Newshour from the BBC World Service. If you want a sense of what it’s all about in less than five minutes, this is probably your link.

Here’s a discussion of uncertainty in various guises on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week that features me, Matthew Syed (author of Black Box Thinking), Helga Nowotny (author of The Cunning of Uncertainty) and David Willetts (author of The Pinch), very thoughtfully brought together by Tom Sutcliffe.

Here’s a Guardian podcast. As well as me, reading an extract and chatting with Richard Lee (starts at 14:00) there’s also Gaia Vince winning the Royal Society’s Winton Prize for Science Books for her excellent Adventures in the Anthropocene (and bemoaning the horrors of sitting at a desk that was opposite mine at the time!) and a review of Morissey’s novel.

Here’s an Economist podcast in which I talk about the book with my colleague Lane Greene.

And here’s an episode of Radio 4’s Inside Science that was recorded at the very delightful Write on Kew literary festival in Kew Gardens. As well as me there’s Kew’s Director of Science, Kathy Willis; Ilia Leitch, who works on the absurdly large genomes that some plants contrive to maintain, and Aaron Davis, who looks at how coffee is going to fare in a hotter world, all under the watchful eye of Adam Rutherford.

Many thanks to all the hosts, interviewers and producers involved. I’ll probably update this post as and when.

This isn’t really apropos of anything, but I got to thinking about the use I make or allow of “Nobel prize winning” in things I write and edit. Sometimes it is obviously relevant; when I wrote about Paul Crutzen’s intervention in the geoengineering debate in my book, the meaning the prize had for his stature made it germane; when I wrote about Haber and Bosch the irony, especially in the context of Alfred Nobel’s business, seemed worth pointing up. But are other mentions worthwhile, or fair. Or are they thumbs on the scale? For example, if one says that Hans Bethe was a Nobel prize winner and nearby have cause to mention John von Neumann without such an accolade, will the reader take it that Bethe was a bigger deal in some way? When I mention Sydney Chapman close to where I mention Crutzen, do readers take the fact that I can’t say Chapman got a Nobel as evidence that he wasn’t a scientist of like stature (which he surely was; I would love to learn why his amazing work wasn’t honoured*).

I think most of the time when we are writing about science and a Nobel prize winner crops up we mention the accolade just to make our story stand a little taller — we think it will matter to the reader. But in a news story, as opposed to a feature that has time to get into who’s who and what’s what, are we not also adding a bit of bias, suggesting that this is the person to take seriously in the debate? And is mention of a Nobel prize that isn’t really germane to the story, just to the past accomplishments of one player in it, really just a way of puffing things up?

There’s an added wrinkle when you think across disciplines. It seems to me that it is in some ways easier to get a Nobel prize (or “Nobel prize”) in economics than in the natural sciences; the size of the pool is just smaller. And the rhetorical weight an economics prize adds to statements that are more likely to be policy-germane is as great or greater. So should Nobel prizes be mentioned for economists? After all, the prize isn’t for general stature, or for likeliness to say true things. It is for a specific piece of work that may have no relevance to the matter at hand.

Anyway, it seems a vaguely interesting ethical/standards-and-practices issue for people in my line of work to consider. I doubt anyone else cares all that much, and it’s quite possible most of my colleagues don’t, either. And it may be that this is mostly just to say “Sorry, Robert Shiller, I needed to cut a line…”

*When I say that I would love to know this I mean I would love someone to tell me, or to happen across the info while looking for something else, not that I would love it enough to go and , like, do some research…

Interesting article in Fusion about nootropics spurs the thought that if these companies think they are selling something that works, they should sell it in trial form. You’d get a blister pack with numbered wells, half containing the active product, half a placebo. You’d record — maybe through an associated app — whether you felt that day’s pill had worked or not. At the end of a month, or whatever, the company would unblind your blister pack for you and you’d get a sense of whether the days on which you had felt the drug had had an effect were days on which you had in fact taken it.

Best if you do it with a range of drugs — that way people can find the one that works for them (assuming individual responses vary). It’s all very citizen science rah-rah and win-win: the company ends up with a good rep among evidence-oriented types and knowing more about its product (maybe you get a discount if you share some genome data with the provider?); consumers get a product that they can have some faith in; sum of human knowledge is increased.