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Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World's Climate Engineers
Historian, journalist, and author Gwynne Dyer interviews the world’s top 100 climate scientists to discuss the extraordinary measures we must contemplate to counter the irreversible effects of climate change.
The global climate emergency is now an alarming fact of life. Much as we still need to get emissions under control, many are thinking that it's all too little, too late. As scientists, politicians and concerned citizens scramble for solutions to the catastrophic effects of a warming world, is it time to be exploring the controversial topic of geoengineering?
For decades, discerning readers have turned to journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer for his unparalleled acumen in serving up hard geopolitical truths. Intervention Earth is built around Dyer’s interviews with one hundred climate scientists from around the globe, including the leading figures in the geoengineering field. One of the most interesting the pros and cons of Solar Radiation Management, a possible planetary Hail Mary that is rife with political risks.
But Intervention Earth is about more than technological mega-projects. Dyer devotes ample space to the many innovative ideas on offer, but there is no get-out-of-jail-free card. We will need a whole portfolio of techniques and technologies—and a lot of hard, thankless work—to keep the planet hospitable for humanity.
What’s more, many of the technologies that can help us avoid the worst outcomes require years of investment and development before they can be successfully deployed. Global cooperation will be key in implementing the life-saving strategies outlined in the book. With up-to-the-minute, breaking-news reporting Intervention Earth offers a probing, eye-opening look at the problems we face, and the innovations that just might keep us ahead of encroaching disaster and carry us to a safe harbour.
The global climate emergency is now an alarming fact of life. Much as we still need to get emissions under control, many are thinking that it's all too little, too late. As scientists, politicians and concerned citizens scramble for solutions to the catastrophic effects of a warming world, is it time to be exploring the controversial topic of geoengineering?
For decades, discerning readers have turned to journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer for his unparalleled acumen in serving up hard geopolitical truths. Intervention Earth is built around Dyer’s interviews with one hundred climate scientists from around the globe, including the leading figures in the geoengineering field. One of the most interesting the pros and cons of Solar Radiation Management, a possible planetary Hail Mary that is rife with political risks.
But Intervention Earth is about more than technological mega-projects. Dyer devotes ample space to the many innovative ideas on offer, but there is no get-out-of-jail-free card. We will need a whole portfolio of techniques and technologies—and a lot of hard, thankless work—to keep the planet hospitable for humanity.
What’s more, many of the technologies that can help us avoid the worst outcomes require years of investment and development before they can be successfully deployed. Global cooperation will be key in implementing the life-saving strategies outlined in the book. With up-to-the-minute, breaking-news reporting Intervention Earth offers a probing, eye-opening look at the problems we face, and the innovations that just might keep us ahead of encroaching disaster and carry us to a safe harbour.
348 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 26, 2024
16 people are currently reading
129 people want to read
About the author
Gwynne Dyer
34 books111 followersGwynne Dyer, OC is a London-based independent Canadian journalist, syndicated columnist and military historian.
Dyer was born in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador (then the Dominion of Newfoundland) and joined the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve at the age of sixteen. While still in the naval reserve, he obtained a BA in history from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1963; an MA in military history from Rice University in Houston, Texas, in 1966; and a PhD in military and Middle Eastern history at King's College London in 1973. Dyer served in the Canadian, American and British naval reserves. He was employed as a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, 1973–77. In 1973 he began writing articles for leading London newspapers on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and soon decided to abandon academic life for a full-time career in journalism. In 2010, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Dyer was born in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador (then the Dominion of Newfoundland) and joined the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve at the age of sixteen. While still in the naval reserve, he obtained a BA in history from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1963; an MA in military history from Rice University in Houston, Texas, in 1966; and a PhD in military and Middle Eastern history at King's College London in 1973. Dyer served in the Canadian, American and British naval reserves. He was employed as a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, 1973–77. In 1973 he began writing articles for leading London newspapers on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and soon decided to abandon academic life for a full-time career in journalism. In 2010, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 8, 2024
My top book this year in reading is this 📕 book 📕
The book around 50-60% between those percentages got me hooked thinking climate science 🧬 is…..
No silly childhood conjecture.
It’s a grown up book 📕 needing to be taught to many adults as possible
A sad 😔 truth Albertan’s decline to acknowledge or speak up on is.
Patents will be bought up and buried, influencers will be 'encouraged' to spread fear of the new food technologies online, expensive nuisance lawsuits alleging safety issues will be brought against start-ups.
All the old tricks and a few new ones will be deployed to preserve the present structure of food production and oil/gas.
Daniel Smith was elected as Premier from a radio 📻 host as an influencer to do just that. To encourage spread of fear of new food, technologies, and new oil and gas technology.
Making of vehicles 🚗 and vehicles 🚗 on the road will see. I know commuting is the worst part of everyone day. Doing it as a professional, for over 15 years, several in years in taxi 🚕 and five-six years in newpaper delivery, 🚚 now 2 years in grocery delivery 🚚. I have to say delivering groceries is the best and a dream job. Compared to taxi 🚕 driving. Everyone is super thankful when I show up. It also takes hundreds of vehicles 🚗 off the road when you don’t need a vehicle to pick up groceries public transit, vehicle pooling or taxi is way affordable than a owning a vehicle
However, the real savings in emissions must await the advent of genuinely self-driving cars. Once they arrive, the transition from a 1.5-billion car world to a
300-million car world may take less than two decades.
It took New York City twenty years - from 1900 to
1920 - to go from streets full of horse-drawn carts and carriages to streets full of cars, but that was a complete change of technology. The transition from 1.5 billion privately owned cars that are parked for 95 per cent of the time to a few hundred million self-driving cars, all Evs that are publicly or commercially owned, instantly available on call on the Uber model but much cheaper (there's no driver to pay), and continuously in use, is much less demanding.
Of immediate concern in the next thirty to fifty years is the loss of, say, a quarter of the Greenland ice cap (two metres of sea level rise) and/or the collapse of a couple of big glaciers in West Antarctica (another two or three metres). Combined with the contribution from thermal expansion, we could be looking at a total sea level rise of as much as three or four metres as early as 2075. But there may be something we could do about that.
There has been great progress in food production during the past sixty years, thanks mainly to the so-called 'Green Revolution'. The world's population has tripled since the Second World War and we're still managing to feed almost everybody, although the total amount of cultivated land has grown by no more than 10 per cent since 1945. But that bonus has now been paid out and there are debts falling due, especially in terms of groundwater supplies that have been pumped dry. We stand to lose almost as much food production in the
tropics and the subtropics in the next two generations as we gained in the last two.
Can we put a number on the scale of the hunger? Such numbers are rare, mainly because governments don't want that sort of number becoming public, as it would certainly generate demands for actions that they are unable, unready or unwilling to take. This was the case with the confidential contracts given out by the World Bank more than a dozen years ago to non-governmental think tanks in the major world capitals, commissioning them to conduct studies on how much food production would fall in the country where they were based when
the average global temperature reaches +2°c. The
results of these studies have never been made public,
presumably because the World Bank's member states
forbade it. I only know of them because I interviewed
the head of one of the think tanks that had the contracts.
We looked at the impact of a two-degree c rise and the associated extra precipitation on the soil, on what is being grown today, how various districts would be affected, etc. For two degrees of global warming, we found a 25 per cent loss of food production in India. One would expect large-scale hunger, large-scale migration and riots.
Dr Jyoti Parikh, Executive Director, Integrated Research
and Development (IRAD), New Delhi
I asked Dr Parikh if she knew what the predictions had been for other countries. She only knew of one, for China, and only because somebody in the Beijing think tank, quite against the rules, had posted the executive summary of its report on China on that organisation's website for a few hours before the management (or the Great Firewall) took it down again. China would lose 38 per cent of its food production at +2°c, it said. No government that allows that to happen can hope to
survive.
However, the energy that drives this circulation comes from the temperature difference between the two air masses it divides. As rapid warming in the Arctic shrinks that difference, the jet stream is slowing down.
Long S-shaped curves called Rossby waves were once just an occasional feature of the generally straight jet stream, but, as that has slowed both the frequency and the amplitude of the Rossby waves have increased.
They are often now great loops deviating far north and south from the straight track, and those loops bring with them cold polar air rarely seen so far south, or warm air not often seen previously so far north. The waves are also showing a tendency to get 'stuck', with big loops
containing very warm or very cold air loitering over the same area for several weeks - which can mean 'killer'
heatwaves and extreme cold spells in unaccustomed parts of the northern hemisphere.
We are dealing with this year in Alberta from BC…. There is no domestic fruit this year cause of the frost that happen this last year and this year.
Killer frost….
Then the heat waves 🌊 with fires 🔥. Alberta is importing all its fruit cause of killer frostbite that last several
Weeks.
The book around 50-60% between those percentages got me hooked thinking climate science 🧬 is…..
No silly childhood conjecture.
It’s a grown up book 📕 needing to be taught to many adults as possible
A sad 😔 truth Albertan’s decline to acknowledge or speak up on is.
Patents will be bought up and buried, influencers will be 'encouraged' to spread fear of the new food technologies online, expensive nuisance lawsuits alleging safety issues will be brought against start-ups.
All the old tricks and a few new ones will be deployed to preserve the present structure of food production and oil/gas.
Daniel Smith was elected as Premier from a radio 📻 host as an influencer to do just that. To encourage spread of fear of new food, technologies, and new oil and gas technology.
Making of vehicles 🚗 and vehicles 🚗 on the road will see. I know commuting is the worst part of everyone day. Doing it as a professional, for over 15 years, several in years in taxi 🚕 and five-six years in newpaper delivery, 🚚 now 2 years in grocery delivery 🚚. I have to say delivering groceries is the best and a dream job. Compared to taxi 🚕 driving. Everyone is super thankful when I show up. It also takes hundreds of vehicles 🚗 off the road when you don’t need a vehicle to pick up groceries public transit, vehicle pooling or taxi is way affordable than a owning a vehicle
However, the real savings in emissions must await the advent of genuinely self-driving cars. Once they arrive, the transition from a 1.5-billion car world to a
300-million car world may take less than two decades.
It took New York City twenty years - from 1900 to
1920 - to go from streets full of horse-drawn carts and carriages to streets full of cars, but that was a complete change of technology. The transition from 1.5 billion privately owned cars that are parked for 95 per cent of the time to a few hundred million self-driving cars, all Evs that are publicly or commercially owned, instantly available on call on the Uber model but much cheaper (there's no driver to pay), and continuously in use, is much less demanding.
Of immediate concern in the next thirty to fifty years is the loss of, say, a quarter of the Greenland ice cap (two metres of sea level rise) and/or the collapse of a couple of big glaciers in West Antarctica (another two or three metres). Combined with the contribution from thermal expansion, we could be looking at a total sea level rise of as much as three or four metres as early as 2075. But there may be something we could do about that.
There has been great progress in food production during the past sixty years, thanks mainly to the so-called 'Green Revolution'. The world's population has tripled since the Second World War and we're still managing to feed almost everybody, although the total amount of cultivated land has grown by no more than 10 per cent since 1945. But that bonus has now been paid out and there are debts falling due, especially in terms of groundwater supplies that have been pumped dry. We stand to lose almost as much food production in the
tropics and the subtropics in the next two generations as we gained in the last two.
Can we put a number on the scale of the hunger? Such numbers are rare, mainly because governments don't want that sort of number becoming public, as it would certainly generate demands for actions that they are unable, unready or unwilling to take. This was the case with the confidential contracts given out by the World Bank more than a dozen years ago to non-governmental think tanks in the major world capitals, commissioning them to conduct studies on how much food production would fall in the country where they were based when
the average global temperature reaches +2°c. The
results of these studies have never been made public,
presumably because the World Bank's member states
forbade it. I only know of them because I interviewed
the head of one of the think tanks that had the contracts.
We looked at the impact of a two-degree c rise and the associated extra precipitation on the soil, on what is being grown today, how various districts would be affected, etc. For two degrees of global warming, we found a 25 per cent loss of food production in India. One would expect large-scale hunger, large-scale migration and riots.
Dr Jyoti Parikh, Executive Director, Integrated Research
and Development (IRAD), New Delhi
I asked Dr Parikh if she knew what the predictions had been for other countries. She only knew of one, for China, and only because somebody in the Beijing think tank, quite against the rules, had posted the executive summary of its report on China on that organisation's website for a few hours before the management (or the Great Firewall) took it down again. China would lose 38 per cent of its food production at +2°c, it said. No government that allows that to happen can hope to
survive.
However, the energy that drives this circulation comes from the temperature difference between the two air masses it divides. As rapid warming in the Arctic shrinks that difference, the jet stream is slowing down.
Long S-shaped curves called Rossby waves were once just an occasional feature of the generally straight jet stream, but, as that has slowed both the frequency and the amplitude of the Rossby waves have increased.
They are often now great loops deviating far north and south from the straight track, and those loops bring with them cold polar air rarely seen so far south, or warm air not often seen previously so far north. The waves are also showing a tendency to get 'stuck', with big loops
containing very warm or very cold air loitering over the same area for several weeks - which can mean 'killer'
heatwaves and extreme cold spells in unaccustomed parts of the northern hemisphere.
We are dealing with this year in Alberta from BC…. There is no domestic fruit this year cause of the frost that happen this last year and this year.
Killer frost….
Then the heat waves 🌊 with fires 🔥. Alberta is importing all its fruit cause of killer frostbite that last several
Weeks.
July 30, 2024
What do we need to do to combat global warming? Everything. As soon as possible.
This book is provocative and stimulating in its argument; it is also at times deeply annoying in its crude dismissal of anyone who may have moral misgivings or technical concerns bout solar geoengineering. However, ultimately it comes from a place of genuine concern for the future.
The author departs from a stark and clear-eyed understanding of how serious climate upheaval truly is, and how much worse it can get. Based on the latest scientific research he makes a convincing case that the issue isn't just gradual global warming, but stark climate collapse as a result of triggering irreversible "tipping points". He then goes through the various steps the global community would have to take to prevent these, when we are already very late in the game.
The book is racily written and informative, but as I said, ultimately not very charitable towards the various moral, political or technical reasons why people might oppose geo-engineering - which are all too glibly dismissed as whiny time-wasting.
This book is provocative and stimulating in its argument; it is also at times deeply annoying in its crude dismissal of anyone who may have moral misgivings or technical concerns bout solar geoengineering. However, ultimately it comes from a place of genuine concern for the future.
The author departs from a stark and clear-eyed understanding of how serious climate upheaval truly is, and how much worse it can get. Based on the latest scientific research he makes a convincing case that the issue isn't just gradual global warming, but stark climate collapse as a result of triggering irreversible "tipping points". He then goes through the various steps the global community would have to take to prevent these, when we are already very late in the game.
The book is racily written and informative, but as I said, ultimately not very charitable towards the various moral, political or technical reasons why people might oppose geo-engineering - which are all too glibly dismissed as whiny time-wasting.
February 14, 2025
A must read. Hard truths. Educators need to teach this book.
November 2, 2024
Who needs to read this book? Everyone.
January 9, 2025
There is some useful information in the earlier chapters of the book, but my one-star rating is based on the egregious misinformation in the chapter on solar geoengineering. This is a subject I have worked on professionally extensively as a professor in a major university. The author comes down in favor of deploying solar geoengineering -- a scheme for shooting pollutants into the upper atmosphere to counter the warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions, which are a very different sort of pollutant with very different effect on climate. The author claims erroneously that all of the objections to this dangerous climate intervention have been refuted. His understanding of the climate physics is very shallow, and in particular hasn't absorbed the fact that the effect of emitted carbon dioxide on climate extends for millennia even after emissions cease, whereas the stratospheric pollutants advocated as an offsetting cooling mechanism fall out of the atmosphere in a year or two. That means that if you come to rely on solar geoengineering, the technology has to be maintained not just for centuries, but for millennia, and if you ever have to stop (and a lot can happen in a thousand years) the world is faced with catastrophic rapid warming. The author falls into the fallacy of thinking of solar geoengineering as "buying time" whereas carbon dioxide ratchets up temperature essentially irreversibly. (geoengineering boosters play the card of future development of carbon dioxide removal, but this is a fantasy. It will be a real stretch even to achieve enough removal to offset recalcitrant emissions, let alone drawing down existing stocks of atmospheric carbon dioxide). Worse, the author falls into the trap of justifying solar geoengineering on the grounds that we haven't started reducing emissions. That's the worst possible use case for solar geoengineering, since if it is deployed while carbon dioxide is still being emitted, vastly more solar geoengineering has to be deployed each year, incurring ever increasing risk of catastrophic warming each and every year. The author claims to have interviewed the "top 100" climate scientists, but in the solar geoengineering chapter quotes only solar geoenginering boosters, who have staked their careers on increased funding for solar geoengineering research.
The biggest flaw in this chapter is the utter neglect of the sociopolitical context. If solar geoengineering were every to be considered a part of the portfolio of actions, it would require an unprecedented level of international cooperation and fact-based decision making. In a world where lies are spread routinely by Trump, Musk and Putin, is this even conceivable?
The biggest flaw in this chapter is the utter neglect of the sociopolitical context. If solar geoengineering were every to be considered a part of the portfolio of actions, it would require an unprecedented level of international cooperation and fact-based decision making. In a world where lies are spread routinely by Trump, Musk and Putin, is this even conceivable?
April 17, 2025
I'm a big fan of Gwynne Dyer, and I've read all his books. This one I found particularly interesting. Using the science available up to 2023/24, Dyer gives us an in-depth look at what is happening to our climate and what will happen if we continue on this path. He also gives us a good look at what options we have and what research is going on to stop or lessen the effects of global warming.
Dyer holds out hope for the future. I sure hope he's right. Any possible solutions would require unprecedented cooperation with countries around the world. When has that ever happened? It surely won't under Donald Trump's administration.
Dyer holds out hope for the future. I sure hope he's right. Any possible solutions would require unprecedented cooperation with countries around the world. When has that ever happened? It surely won't under Donald Trump's administration.
April 8, 2025
Not to be read by anyone dealing with anxiety but a stellar account of how we got to where we are, where we are headed, what we won't do to fix it and ending with possible mitigation strategies the smart people are working on.
I had cut back significantly on beef consumption but after reading a clear and concise summary of the all-in damage that comes from raising cows I will do my best to give it up entirely. It is not enough to undo the damage I personally have caused with my way of life but it's a start. You're welcome grandchildren.
I had cut back significantly on beef consumption but after reading a clear and concise summary of the all-in damage that comes from raising cows I will do my best to give it up entirely. It is not enough to undo the damage I personally have caused with my way of life but it's a start. You're welcome grandchildren.
August 16, 2024
No matter your core discipline (I, myself, am no engineer or climate scientist), I would strongly recommend this book that essentially presents the climate crisis reality in a very easy to absorb way. Perhaps books like these could serve as a springboard for more people to get involved in the climate crisis, the existence of which only the ignorant or sneaky ones fail to admit.
January 30, 2025
It is a massive amount of information to absorb on an immensely difficult subject, climate, which the author has spent years studying. Occasionally I found it a little too much and would have to put it aside for a couple of days.
He does a credible job of outlining the possibilities available to us and does end on a somewhat positive note despite all the doom and gloom throughout.
He does a credible job of outlining the possibilities available to us and does end on a somewhat positive note despite all the doom and gloom throughout.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews