Word: solarization
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...when word went out that Ian McEwan's new novel, Solar, would be about global warming, climate researchers might have hoped they'd found their champion. With his portrait of a relentlessly rational science writer in Enduring Love and his detailed descriptions of neurosurgery in Saturday, McEwan is the rare novelist who understands the scientific world - and the mind-set of the scientist. If anyone could make a best seller out of the sticky stuff of climate science and a hero out of one of its practitioners, it would be McEwan. (See the top 10 fiction books...
...turns out, they might want to wait for Al Gore's next book. McEwan has turned his sharp, satirical eye to climate change, and the result is anything but heroic. In making Solar a comedy - albeit one as black as the dark side of the moon - McEwan gives the lie to vain hopes that the planet will be saved by a sudden outbreak of environmental virtue. If we're going to avoid choking on what McEwan calls the "hot breath of civilization," we're going to have to harness human nature, in all its selfishness, mendacity - and occasional genius...
...other words, we're going to need Michael Beard, a rotund, balding, 50-ish English physicist coasting on a Nobel Prize he won two decades ago. As Solar begins, Beard is in the waning days of his fifth marriage, hanging on as the chief of a government center on renewable energy, where climate change takes up less space in his mind than adultery. "Beard was not wholly skeptical about climate change," McEwan writes. "But he himself had other things to think about." (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...Artificial photosynthesis is a real idea, although it's further from deployment than the novel suggests. McEwan's background research is so seamlessly displayed that scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - busy working on the same topic - might wonder if he's nicked their notes. But where Solar really succeeds - beyond the dark comedy, too long missing in McEwan's gentler recent work - is the author's ability to reveal the nature of the climate conundrum in the very human life of his protagonist. Beard is a Nobel Prize - winning mess, an obese man who can't stop eating...
...Arctic" study, funded by the Pew Environment Group, assessed trends in the Arctic's cooling mechanisms and examined the financial consequences. The research team looked at the rate at which surfaces change from white ice and snow to ocean or exposed tundra, since darker surfaces absorb, rather than reflect, solar heat. According to the report, this shift and the increased methane emissions linked with melting permafrost currently slap us with annual losses in the range of $61 billion to $371 "resulting from such changes as heat waves and flooding." But the anticipated monetary fallout described in the study, expected...