Climate Change Science

Five Times Faster is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganize our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe.

Why would someone who cares so deeply about ecological change want to stop talking about it now? At Work in the Ruins is the book that grew out of Dougald’s attempt to answer that question. He delves deeply into what he discovered during the globally shared isolating Covid moment, why the virus and the measures taken against it drove so many of us to despair, and how we can re-find our bearings if the pandemic is not the big event that changes everything but simply one in a chain of emergencies that are bringing about the end of the world as we knew it.

Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutions come at a cost. Mining lithium is environmentally destructive. We therefore confront a dilemma: Is it possible to save the world by harming it in the process? Having spent over a decade researching mining and oil sectors in Latin America, Thea Riofrancos is a leading voice on resource extraction. In Extraction, she draws on groundbreaking fieldwork on the global race for lithium.

Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Giulio Boc­caletti - honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Univer­sity of Oxford - shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civ­ilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers.

Just as World War II called an earlier generation to greatness, so the climate crisis is calling today's rising youth to action: to create a better future. In Unstoppable, Bill Nye crystallizes and expands the message for which he is best known and beloved. That message is that with a combination of optimism and scientific curiosity, all obstacles become opportunities, and the possibilities of our world become limitless.

Carbon is the only element that animates the entirety of the living world. Though comprising a tiny fraction of Earth’s composition, our planet is lifeless without it. Yet it is maligned as the driver of climate change, scorned as an errant element blamed for the possible demise of civilization. Here, Paul Hawken looks at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Embracing a panoramic view of carbon’s omnipresence, he explores how this ubiquitous and essential element extends into every aperture of existence and shapes the entire fabric of life.

Pacific Gas and Electric was a legacy company built by innovators and visionaries, establishing California as a desirable home and economic powerhouse. In California Burning, Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer finalist Katherine Blunt examines how that legacy fell apart—unraveling a long history of deadly failures in which Pacific Gas and Electric endangered millions of Northern Californians, through criminal neglect of its infrastructure.

In the 60,000 years since people began colonizing the continents, a recurring feature of human civilization has been mobility - the ever-constant search for resources and stability. Seismic global events - wars and genocides, revolutions and pandemics - have only accelerated the process. The map of humanity isn’t settled - not now, not ever.

A world-leading sport ecologist, Madeleine interviews athletes, coaches, politicians and thought-leaders to learn more about the inevitable consequences for this trillion-dollar industry. From the front lines of climate change, Warming Up takes listeners through a play-by-play of how global warming is already impacting sport, and how the sports world can fight back.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty for the benefit of European powers.

With vivid, observant reporting, veteran environmental journalist Fred Pearce transports listeners to the remote cloud forests of Ecuador, the remains of a forest civilization in Nigeria, a mystifying mountain peak in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and the boreal forests of western Canada and the United States, where devastating wildfires are linked to suppressing the natural fire cycles of forests and the maintenance practices of Indigenous peoples. Throughout the book, Pearce interviews the people who traditionally live in forests.

In The Climate Optimist Handbook, Anne Therese Gennari offers encouragement, wisdom, and practical tools to help us let go of fear and the dismal truth of today to build toward a world that can be better and more beautiful than anything we've yet seen. That future starts with shifting the narrative on climate change so we can act from courage and excitement, not fear. We must let go of the guilt and responsibility we feel to save the planet and move into a place of opportunity, optimism, and hope.

A youth movement is reenergizing global environmental activism. The "climate generation"—late millennials and iGen, or Generation Z—is demanding that policy makers and government leaders take immediate action to address the dire outcomes predicted by climate science. Those inheriting our planet's environmental problems expect to encounter challenges, but they may not have the skills to grapple with the feelings of powerlessness and despair that may arise when they confront this seemingly intractable situation.

After decades of missed opportunities, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today's industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion. What is the world going to look like when all these changes have run their course? Author John Michael Greer seeks to answer this question, and with some degree of accuracy, since civilizations tend to collapse in remarkably similar ways.

Over his long career as witness to an extreme 20th century, National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, Lifton writes, "presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind" - what he describes as the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward climate sanity.

Atmospheric scientist Markus Rex recounts the monumental Arctic expedition he captained for one year in this gripping and authoritative book. A groundbreaking step toward understanding the climate crisis, the MOSAiC expedition was the first of its kind, journeying deep into the epicenter of climate change, the Arctic, to seek hard-to-find and potentially world-changing scientific data. The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time is about the teamwork it takes to complete a risky goal, all in the name of understanding—and responding to—the climate crisis.

In H Is for Hope, Elizabeth Kolbert investigates the landscape of climate change—from “A,” for Svante Arrhenius, who created the world’s first climate model in 1894, to “Z,” for the Colorado River Basin, ground zero for climate change in the United States. Along the way she looks at Greta Thunburg’s “blah blah blah” speech (“B”), learns to fly an all-electric plane (“E”), experiments with the effects of extreme temperatures on the human body (“T”), and struggles with the deep uncertainty of the future of climate change (“U”).

The second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. Over the course of four years, Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money.

In an era brimming with misleading headlines and polarized debates, take a deep dive into the unvarnished truth of climate change with this illuminating guide. Ever felt bombarded by the staggering numbers and statistics on climate disasters? Frustrated by the blame game and endless debates? Overwhelmed by conflicting information about the very real challenges the planet faces? You're not the only one. Navigating the complex landscape of climate change isn't just about understanding the science it's about cutting through the noise to find truth and meaningful action.

Using Australia as a springboard, this book explores the science in folk history. It looks at ancient tales and traditions that may in all probability be rooted in scientifically verifiable fact and can be explored via geological evidence, such as the biblical flood. Nowadays the majority of our historical knowledge comes from the written word, but in The Edge of Memory, Patrick Nunn explores the largely untapped resource of the collective human memory that is held in stories. This important book explores the wider implications for our knowledge of how human society has developed through the millennia.