Rising Tide Australia

Ian McEwan approaches the climate crisis in comic mode

Climate change is chiefly an engineering problem to Michael Beard, the central character in Ian McEwan's new novel. In a different sense, it is to McEwan too. A practised manipulator of his readers' expectations and responses, he has plainly thought hard about the difficulties of dealing in a work of fiction with something that comes trailing strong emotions and unhelpful narrative models.

In contrast to the politics of global warming, for example, the science can't easily be debated dramatically without giving undue weight to the denialist camp, which he's unwilling to do. On the other hand, apocalyptic urgency, which shadows so much of the rhetoric around the issue, is equally unattractive to McEwan, a long-term fan of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium. Finally, and maybe most intractably, there's the problem of response-fatigue. Pressing invitations to think about global warming aren't thin on the ground. McEwan's solution is both elegant and surprising: instead of applying doom and gloom, he reaches for a lighter, more comic mode than usual.

Beard, a short, fat, philandering physicist, serves as the novel's scientifically informed focal consciousness and as a quasi-allegorical figure. In this, he resembles Henry Perowne, the neurosurgeon at the heart of Saturday (2005). But here too comedy gets McEwan round a problem. The earlier novel's unironic stance towards its central figure, along with its vanilla-flavoured politics, grated badly on many readers, who saw it – whatever its technical merits – as a novel about a smug, rich man who's almost proud of his inability to decide if invading Iraq is a good idea. Beard shares Perowne's distaste for zeal: though never in doubt about the basic science of global warming, he begins the novel suspicious of the "Old Testament ring" to environmentalists' forewarnings. This time, however, it's made clear from the start that we won't be asked to admire this mildly preposterous character, a generator of ironies as much as an observer of them.

The first of the book's three sections begins in 2000. Beard is 53, his best days long behind him. A Nobel laureate for his early theoretical work ("the Beard-Einstein Conflation") on the photoelectric effect, he sits on committees, lends his name and prestige to institutional letterheads, and fills the role of "Chief" at a research centre outside Reading that has been set up to allow the Blair government to be seen as doing something to combat climate change. For Beard, this phenomenon is merely "one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action . . . But he himself had other things to think about." The most insistent of these things is his fifth wife Patrice's affair with the builder who did up their house in Belsize Park, an affair she's embarked on in a mood of buoyant vengefulness after coming across evidence of Beard's numerous infidelities.

In order to escape Patrice's icy good cheer, and the attentions of a young physicist at the centre, Tom Aldous, who keeps trying to interest him in artificial photosynthesis, Beard signs up for a trip to the Arctic. This entirely selfish decision is greeted as a great step forward by the centre's idealists and its time-serving co-boss. Beard heads north in the company of various arts-world luminaries. "Everyone but Beard was worried about global warming and was merry"; only the semi-sceptical physicist is appropriately sombre. There's an echo of Perowne's somewhat priggish disapproval of the anti-war protesters' levity in Saturday, but Beard's moroseness springs less from intellectual consistency than the fact that he has nearly frozen off his penis by emptying his bladder in subzero temperatures. This uncomfortable episode, and the journey it takes place on, is the first of McEwan's customary set-pieces in the book, and it's as though he's decided to give full rein to the comic overtones held back in 2007's On Chesil Beach.

Returning to London, Beard is quickly embroiled in more of McEwan's traditional tropes – a life-altering accident and a suspenseful sequence, again given a comic spin. Then a new section starts, set in 2005. Divorced and even fatter, Beard has reinvented himself as a clean-energy entrepreneur. He has, it turns out, been sacked from the centre after making some off-the-cuff remarks on the low numbers of women in high-level physics jobs. McEwan draws fruitfully on his own experiences with the press here and has some satiric fun at the expense of arts academics, though Beard's troubles, modelled on Larry Summers's at Harvard, aren't quite believable in an English setting. The physicist has also acquired a new girlfriend and an addiction to salt and vinegar crisps; weirdly, McEwan uses these last items to have him experience a well known anecdote – another set-piece – and then has an irritating know-all pop up to explain what a well known anecdote it is.

Beard's main business, however, is to lecture a group of institutional investors on alternative energy. The novel carefully undercuts both his virtue and his dignity: he spends his time at the podium trying not to vomit, having eaten a dodgy smoked salmon sandwich, and parts of his pitch are either plagiarised or hypocritical fabrications. All the same, his actual arguments are compelling, and it's hard not to root for him as, in the final section, he prepares to throw the switch on a prototype array of next-generation solar panels in New Mexico. It's now 2009, and Beard, fatter still and trying to ignore a worrying melanoma, has further romantic entanglements and professional complications on his plate. As various chickens from the first two sections start coming home to roost, still in comic mode, McEwan builds up considerable suspense about the fate of Beard's enterprise, a revolutionary technology that, you end up half-believing, might save the world.

In the course of his trip to the Arctic circle, Beard hears some unfamiliar guitar music, "reflective, with a touch of lightness and precision, like something of Mozart's". Solar seems to aim for something similar and, as you'd expect, precision isn't a problem in its brisk tour d'horizon of the ironies arising from climate change. McEwan swiftly persuades the reader that he can write authoritatively not only about science but the culture of scientific institutions, too. He also revels in clever, sometimes over-neat reversals. At one point, Beard's business partner starts to worry that the climate might not be changing after all. "It's a catastrophe," Beard assures him. "Relax!"

Lightness, however, comes less easily to McEwan, whose style depends on deliberateness and a certain ponderousness. The ominous lining up of causes and effects and the patient tweaking of narrative tension don't always mesh well with the aimed-for quickness and brio. Some of the humour is quite broad: there's a rather clunking motif concerning polar bears, and Beard gets involved with a stereotypical Southern waitress who's called, in the way of trailer-trash types, Darlene. He emerges as a figure of some comic dynamism, but the pages on his childhood and youth, though brilliantly done, articulate poorly with the knockabout parts of the plot. Once it became clear that the book's world is comic, I also found myself wondering if it wouldn't have benefited from being more loosely assembled, with shorter, discontinuous episodes and Beard functioning along the lines of Updike's Bech, Nabokov's Pnin or the consciousness in Calvino's Cosmicomics.

At the same time, the overarching plot pulls off a clinching novelistic coup, using comedy to sneak grimmer matters past the reader's defences. Beard's argument about the correct response to climate change, an argument that McEwan has also made, is that we have no choice but to hope that technological ingenuity, enlightened self-interest and the market's allocation of resources can get us off the hook; personal virtue counts for little. For a while it seems as though the slobbish, self-centred Beard might actually bring about such an outcome, and the reader starts to hope he'll manage it. But Beard – self-deluding, a serial breaker of resolutions, hopelessly addicted to overconsumption – also stands for humanity in general. When he gets his comeuppance, it's a powerful reminder that reality isn't a comic novel, and in its deepest implications, this book isn't one either.

• Climate change
• Ian McEwan

Christopher Tayler
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After 13 years with the UN, former Irish president Mary Robinson is coming home to her debt-ridden country – not to retire, but to fight for 'climate justice' for all the world's poor

In 1993, three years into her presidency of Ireland, Mary Robinson paid a visit to west Belfast. The trip was controversial before she went – the Irish government didn't want her there, and neither did the British – but it became far more controversial when, in the course of her tour, she happened to shake the hand of a local politician, one Gerry Adams. The next day, "trying to be a good president, I washed the hair and waited for the hairdresser to arrive," Robinson told an RTÉ radio show recently. "And she was a good northern Protestant, and she didn't turn up." Robinson tried to fix it herself, but at her first engagement her efforts were scornfully dismissed: "You'd think she'd have got her hair done to come and see us!" When she got to the airport to give a final press conference, there was a hairdresser waiting – the Northern Irish security forces were so upset about the incident they'd organised one.

Robinson told the anecdote not in order to complain about being a woman in the public eye, judged on appearance alone, but as an example of unexpected thoughtfulness across political lines. Striking, too, is her sympathy with the woman who didn't arrive to do her job, and her understanding of the power of the simple gesture, both to entrench division, and to heal it: there are those who argue her handshake helped pave the way to the IRA ceasefire the next year. Certainly it was brave; some unionists may also have recognised that her characteristic commitment to a fair hearing worked both ways – in the early 1980s she resigned from the Labour party because she felt unionists had not been adequately consulted about the Anglo-Irish agreement. But in the week when the security forces who helped her then are finally answering to Stormont, rather than Westminster, the anecdote also underscores just how far Northern Ireland has travelled in the past 17 years.

And not just Northern Ireland. Robinson is 65 now, and has spent 13 years in New York, first as UN commissioner for human rights, then, after pressure from the Bush administration contributed to her resignation (they were unimpressed by her warnings that the "war on terror" would compromise human rights and saw her as so pro-Palestinian that the conservative National Review accused her of war crimes) as president of Realizing Rights, the advocacy organisation she founded in 2002. But she is moving back to Ireland this year. A rather bruised Ireland, granted, in the grip of recession and rumours of bankruptcy (the Celtic Tiger, she says forthrightly, was an episode of "sheer selfish stupidity"), but an Ireland whose moral place in the EU, whose liberalised laws and reputation as a modern state, she helped to shape.

We meet at Trinity College in central Dublin, in a bare office at the top of the arts faculty building. She looks tired, but is both gracious and completely controlled – she has the rare quality of seeming approachable, even good company, while also making it clear that certain lines are not to be crossed. Many in Ireland, used to the populist bonhomie of working-class male politicians such as Bertie Ahern, have always found her cool, even haughty. And it is true she is an extremely assured presence. Her sentences – full of world leaders, capital cities, global initiatives, sometimes too full of development and human rights jargon – unspool smoothly and clearly into the silence.

Robinson is obviously looking forward to coming home – not least because it will bring her closer to her four grandchildren – but she will not be retiring. Instead, she will be concentrating her efforts on trying to bring about what she calls "climate justice": trying to ensure that those most affected by global warming (generally those who had least to do with producing it) receive some redress. This is a natural progression of her work in New York: at the UN she widened the brief of the human rights commission to include, for example, security, but in the way that women tend to mean it, not men – security of food, safe water, healthcare, shelter. She was criticised at the time for fatally diluting her mandate but she's still having none of it. "I don't at all subscribe to the notion that you weaken human rights by making it relevant to globalisation and corporate responsibility," she says. "Human rights is about holding those with power to account for abuse of power."

Increasingly, however, she has understood that there is little point fighting on all these fronts if "the development of the poor communities that we were working with is being undermined by the impacts of climate change". She makes no bones about her disappointment in Copenhagen – "there wasn't the political leadership there should have been" – and argues that it was not just a specific failure, of one summit, but rather a kind of canary in the coalmine for the shape of the world to come. Partly this is for the obvious reason of not cutting emissions in time – "You know, you can fail to get a Doha agreement, and it may or may not be serious. The failure to get agreement in Copenhagen has put the whole world more at risk" – but partly because, coinciding with the economic crisis in the west, it was such a graphic illustration of a "huge shift in power and allegiances. We face a world where, increasingly, those with economic power don't have, traditionally, strong values in human rights." For the many millions of vulnerable people in the world it's a toxic combination, and she is aware that there isn't time to lose.

These vulnerable people do, however – as she means to point out forcefully in her climate justice work – have an unprecedented weapon in their armoury: they will "form the bulk of population growth, from the 7 billion we'll probably reach this year, to 9 billion-plus in 2050, in 40 years' time. And so for the first time, I think, in human history, the richer parts of the world are dependent for our future survival on what happens in the poorest parts. It's no longer about compassion and philanthropy – it is in our future self-interest to ensure that the poorest have access to low-carbon strategies."

The trouble is, of course, that their governments are generally too overburdened, indebted and distracted by the present to fight this particular fight, but after Copenhagen Robinson does not think governments are the way to go, if they ever were.

The answer, for her, is "civil society": "I mean churches, I mean business, I mean trade unions, I mean the normal environmental groups, development groups, human rights groups, youth groups – as never before we have to build up the pressure." It's a big, frustratingly vague notion – which, she knows well, has often been touted as the solution to intractable problems, not least in Northern Ireland, where it had distinctly limited success – but she seems hopeful, nevertheless.

Robinson likes to trace her profound sense of fairness, and her belief in the possibility of social change, back to when she was a child in Ballina, County Mayo, and visiting her paternal grandfather, who lived down the road. A retired lawyer, he still had "a passion for law – in the sense of the small guy, the tenant against the landlord, etcetera. My grandfather was of the age and disposition where he had no idea how to talk to a child. So he talked to me as if I was an adult, and I loved it. I felt so important."

Her parents were both doctors, although her mother gave up medicine when she had five children in quick succession, of whom Mary was the third ("that was my interest in human rights, being wedged between four brothers"). Robinson insists her mother never expressed regret about this, but "it led me to understand that the real key is to have choices. And that there really isn't the necessary range of choices for women." She went to a convent school, and was happy there, but higher education – finishing school in Paris, a law degree at Trinity Dublin, then a master's at Harvard during the Vietnam war – shook all the assumptions she had grown up with.

When she became auditor of the law society in Dublin in 1967, her inaugural address was on law and morality in Ireland and took on every sacred cow: contraception, women's rights, abortion, gay rights, "including the status of children", she says, "which is just being, finally, addressed now." Two years later, aged 25 and already Trinity's youngest law professor, she ran for a seat in the Irish senate. Her first bill as a mini-skirted young senator aimed to overturn the ban on the import, distribution and sale of contraceptives. Condoms were posted through her letterbox, and in her home village the bishop denounced her from the pulpit. Her parents, despite being doctors and thus presumably apprised of the individual effects of bans on abortion and contraception, believed in the teachings of the Catholic church and were upset by her attempts to change the law; they were even more upset when she announced she was to marry Nick Robinson, a Protestant lawyer who went on to become a political cartoonist. Although this has been described as a religious objection, she recently corrected this impression in an interview with Irish television presenter Gay Byrne: her parents were, she said, "engaged in over-love" – she was their only girl, good at school; nobody, let alone a man known to have had lots of girlfriends, was good enough, and they declined to come to the wedding. In the event the estrangement lasted only three months – the marriage has now lasted for 40 years – but it simply underlined, again, her stubbornness, and her willingness to stand up for what she felt was right.

Which is not a recipe for popularity. When she ran for seats in the lower house, she failed. She came second in the presidential election, winning only when votes from the third-place candidate were transferred. But there were reports of people dancing in the streets when she won, and she, most of all, knew what she had done: "I was elected by the women of Ireland, who instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system." Famously, she lit a lamp in her window, as a welcoming sign to the vast Irish diaspora; deliberately – there was no lack of steel in her campaign, and she quickly showed a willingness to exploit the gaffes of often incompetent rivals – she made herself less private and austere, acquiring suits by Irish designers, trying, above all, to be more open and approachable, more, she told Byrne, like her own warm, gregarious mother. "And the more I did that, the more I got back an extraordinary response." Her approval ratings climbed to 90% and stayed there.

What she quickly realised then, and has honed carefully, ever since, is that there is a real need for a moral authority outside the compromise and horse-trading of conventional politics; she knows, too, that it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to get right.

Furthermore, when Nelson Mandela asked her to join the Elders, a group of 12 eminent leaders chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who, rather sweetly, they call "the Arch") she says she felt it was "quite an arrogant idea". But when "we went to our first planning meeting in South Africa, and Nelson Mandela – Madiba – joined us – that put an end to my doubts, because he was so strong, and he looked around and said, 'It's your task to listen very carefully, be humble. Don't go into a place thinking you know more than the people there.'"

Finding a way to empower civil society is all the more important, she thinks, because the world's largest democracy seems, at the moment, so fragile. "Obama's trying to provide [leadership], but I think that the American political system is becoming dysfunctional, and that's really, really worrying." (Also wobbly, though without quite the same impact on the rest of the world, is Northern Ireland: delicate power-sharing between arch-rivals like the DUP and Sinn Féin is a great achievement, she says, but it makes it "difficult to position those who want to hold that to account … it's not a straightforward democratic process at the moment. It's a tentative post-conflict process.")

She is very aware that something like moral authority was claimed by the neo-con project and its bid to export democracy by force, and that "moral authority" is what is claimed by systems, such as religion, that subjugate women in the developing world. "We made a very strong statement on that," she says.

Finally, she knows that know it is an ever-changing, delicate thing. "When I was president it was two kinds of things – one was to change the role of the office, to develop its potential under the constitution, and then try to exert it. And when I was serving as high commissioner, it was another kind of moral authority, because of the absence of an enforcement mechanism. It was going to where the victims were suffering violations and speaking from their perspective. And now I find it again with the Elders. And the reason why I'm so honoured and passionate to do it is because I feel a terrible sense of urgency. I really do."

• Ireland
• Human rights
• Nelson Mandela
• Climate change
• Poverty

Aida Edemariam
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Will global empathy save us from the catch-22 of climate change? John Gray is sceptical

Whoever hacked into the emails at the University of East Anglia fired the opening salvo in a new kind of dirty war. The Copenhagen conference met on the basis that dealing with global warming was in everyone's interest. The idea that nearly 200 countries could reach meaningful decisions was always unreal, but the meeting's collapse reflected a more fundamental reality.

Environmentalists have always assumed that the threat of disaster will bring about an era of global cooperation. In reality, climate change is triggering another round of geopolitical conflict. Limiting the use of fossil fuels may be essential if disaster is to be avoided, but countries that in different ways rely heavily on these fuels for their prosperity – such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, China and the US – were never going to accept the strict carbon curbs that the EU and others demanded. How much the leaked emails contributed to the breakdown of the summit is unclear, but the effect has been to let those countries, along with the rest of the world, off the hook. The undermining effect on climate science looks like being long-lasting and profound.

"Climategate" was an exercise in postmodern cyber-warfare – a move in a larger conflict that environmentalists show little sign of understanding. In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin suggests that the whole of history is a struggle between the polar forces of empathy and entropy. "There is, I believe, a grand paradox to human history. At the heart of the human saga is a catch-22 – a contradiction of extraordinary significance – that has accompanied our species, if not from the very beginning, then at least from the time our ancestors began their slow metamorphosis from archaic to civilised beings thousands of years before Christ."

The catch-22 is that, as civilisation has extended the reach of empathy beyond the family and the tribe until it covers all of humankind, the expanding infrastructure of industry and transport has needed ever larger inputs of energy, increasing entropy and wrecking the planet.

Moving from hunting and gathering to farming, and then to industrial production, enabled humans to interact with one another as never before, but this increasing interconnection involved depleting the planet, a process that is reaching a climax just as civilisation is becoming planet-wide for the first time. "Our rush to universal empathic connectivity," Rifkin writes, "is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

How can this deadly collision be averted? The answer appears to be straightforward: by developing "biosphere consciousness". "Only by concerted action that establishes a collective sense of affiliation with the entire biosphere will we have a chance to ensure our future." In other words, a transformation of consciousness can save humanity from self-destruction.

It is hardly a new story. How often have we heard environmentalists exclaim that the alternatives facing the world are radical transformation or total catastrophe? The trouble is that their analysis of the environmental crisis is extremely shallow. Climate change is not mainly the work of sinister corporate interests and weak-kneed or corrupt politicians. It is a direct result of the energy-intensive civilisation in which the affluent part of humankind lives, and which the rest very much wants to join. While humans are more interdependent than ever before, they are at the same time destabilising the planet. Reining in corporate interests and chivvying politicians to be greener do nothing to resolve this fundamental contradiction.

Where Rifkin departs from the standard green line is in grasping that all of humanity is caught in a trap, but he seems convinced that, provided human empathy continues to expand, the trap can be sprung without too much difficulty. Rifkin's difficulties start with the claim – in itself quite plausible – that the environmental crisis is a catch-22. Joseph Heller's darkly brilliant satire derives its power from the insight that there are dilemmas from which there is no escape: if you are sane enough to ask to be declared unfit to fly on dangerous missions, then you are fit to fly.

The essence of any catch-22 is that there is no way out, but Rifkin shrinks from this cruel logic, with the result that his argument verges on incoherence. How could human empathy possibly defeat the force of entropy, an irreversible physical process? Does Rifkin believe an increase in altruism can lead to the repeal of the second law of thermodynamics?

His practical proposals for dealing with the climate crisis are disappointingly conventional – massive investment in renewable energy and the like – and, in line with standard green thinking, he never explains how a human population of 7 billion, rising to 9 or 10 billion over the next 50 years, can be supported by a mixture of solar panels and hydrogen-powered fuel cells. Stewart Brand's recent Whole Earth Discipline, which argues that coping with environmental breakdown will necessitate making the most of demonised technologies such as nuclear energy and GM food, is more realistic as well as more visionary.

Most of The Empathic Civilization is not in fact concerned with the practical task of coping with the mess humans have made of the planet. Instead it is devoted to defending Rifkin's view that humans are essentially empathic animals, whose benign qualities have not been fully manifested throughout most of their history. "Wanton widespread violence has not been the norm in human history," Rifkin writes, looking back wistfully on the "tranquil agricultural life that existed for thousands of years" before the "mega-machine" of property and government disrupted humankind's natural innocence. One need not be a hardened cynic to find this Rousseauesque tale implausible. Humans may be more moved by empathy than is sometimes allowed, but empathy for the feelings of others is not only expressed in compassion. It is equally the basis of cruelty, a trait that is also distinctively human.

For all its inordinate length, The Empathic Civilization fails to substantiate its central thesis. The innate sociability of human beings is a fact, but it does not follow that they are likely to cooperate in dealing with environmental crisis. The impact of climate change is rather to intensify human conflict. As global warming accelerates, natural resources such as arable land and water become scarcer, and competition to control them will be acute and pervasive. At the same time, those whose power and wealth come from fossil fuels will do anything they can to promote "climate scepticism".

This is where the leaked emails come in. With global warming fuelling a resurgence of geopolitical tensions, climate science has become a weapon in a war of disinformation. Whatever lapses in intellectual probity they might reveal, the messages are being used to obscure a mass of evidence showing that anthropogenic climate change is real, and may be occurring more rapidly than previously believed. It is still possible to frame an intelligent response to the threat, but first we need to recognise that the climate has become a battleground. Empathy won't save us.

John Gray's Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings is published by Penguin.

• Climate change
• Climate change

John Gray
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Reuters: As U.S. prospects for a national climate change bill fade, five U.S. states and Canadian provinces are on track to start a cap-and-trade market for carbon dioxide in 2012, say officials who see fading federal momentum boosting regional efforts. California, the keystone market with the eighth-largest economy in the world, New Mexico, and the Canadian provinces of Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec all plan to join the system meant to combat climate change and boost economies by ...

Physorg: Wind power has emerged as a viable renewable energy source in recent years -- one that proponents say could lessen the threat of global warming. Although the American Wind Energy Association estimates that only about 2 percent of U.S. electricity is currently generated from wind turbines, the U.S. Department of Energy has said that wind power could account for a fifth of the nation's electricity supply by 2030. But a new MIT analysis may serve to temper enthusiasm about wind power, at ...

Guardian: Each year the UK music industry is responsible for around 540,000 tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions, according to researchers from the UK and US. Three-quarters of this is due to live music performances, while the rest is caused by music recording and publishing. "This is the first study to map the greenhouse-gas emission profile of the music industry," Catherine Bottrill of the University of Surrey told environmentalresearchweb. "Furthermore, there are few publicly available studies ...