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... Five heroes
In our novel we touch on three of the f
our heroes we mention here. These are people who have had a significant impact through alerting us to the dangers we face from unchecked global warming.
In The Art of the Novel we talk about how we use the international global warming television show, WorldHeat, to help the Nick Kangles spread the word of global warming.
The WorldHeat show gave us the chance to pit those who believe we face danger from global warming (Nick and his co-host, the eco-warrior) and those who are skeptical (his co-host Stefan Simons, who is proud to call himself a Denier).
The actions of Al Gore, James Lovelock and Sir Nicholas Stern are described in the WorldHeat show.
Vice-President Al Gore rocked the world with his book, An Inconvenient Truth, planting the flag of global warming in America's consciousness.
James Lovelock, the Gaia Guru, did something similar many years before, when he postulated the Gaia hypothesis (that the earth's biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to maintain the health of the earth by controlling the physical and chemical environment on earth ), and more recently argued that what is at risk is our civilization because of the dangers posed by the new Heat Age we are responsible for.
When Sir Nicholas Stern held a press conference in 2006 to discuss his report The Economics of Climate Change, the world underwent an Aha! moment. This former chief economist of the World Bank spoke out about the perils facing the world if we continued our gluttonous relationship with fossil fuels.
He did more: he framed the discussion of global warming in economic terms and by so doing changed the world. He defined the failure to address global warming as the greatest market failure in the history of the world, and then addressed head on the cost of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
Stern followed with his estimate of the cost of preventing disaster: one percent of world economic output each year. A dollar spent each year to prevent a loss of twenty dollars in every future year.
David Suzuki is the Co-Founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, a broadcaster, and one of the very first to understand the challenge we face with global warming. A geneticist by training, he has spent more than 30 years tirelessly criss-crossing the world to spread the word about the threats to our environment, to the beings on our planet, and to our societies. Among his widely-viewed and internationally acclaimed television series are The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, A Planet for the Taking, and The Secret of Life.
Click here for one of our posts on Dr Suzuki in our Obelisk Seven Blog.
... The Originator of 
Emissions Trading
Nick Kangles is an emissions trader, who tries to spread the concept of using a market in pollution rights as a means to reduce emissions from greenhouse gases. Kate nicknames him The Sin Trader, arguing that emissions trading is similar to the sale by the Catholic Church in medieval times of indulgences, which allowed one to continue to commit sins.
Emissions trading is a relatively new thing, but one of great promise in the fight to reduce global warming, and this brings us to our fourth hero fighting the heat: Professor Graciela Chichilnisky.
Graciela Chichilnisky's website says that she has worked extensively in the Kyoto Protocol process, creating and designing the carbon market that has become international law in 2005.
Working closely for several years with negotiators of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization in charge of deciding world policy with respect to global warming, Professor Chichilnisky acted as a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC received the 2007 Nobel Prize for their work in this area. In 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was signed by 163 nations, Dr. Chichilnisky authored the Protocol language that led to the creation of the carbon market.
Click here for our posting on her in our Obelisk Seven Blog.