Climate Social

Lyme disease is spreading rapidly around the globe as ticks move into places they could not survive before. The first epidemic to emerge in the era of climate change, the disease infects half a million people in the US and Europe each year, and untold multitudes in Canada, China, Russia, and Australia. Mary Beth Pfeiffer shows how we have contributed to this growing menace and how modern medicine has underestimated its danger.

In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion's share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world's megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk.

While reporting just outside of Darfur, Stephan Faris discovered that climate change was at the root of that conflict, and he began to wonder what current and impending - and largely unanticipated - crises such changes have in store for the world. Forecast provides the answers. Global warming will spur the spread of many diseases. Italy has already experienced its first climate-change epidemic of a tropical disease, and malaria is gaining ground in Africa.

Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order.

Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, was asked by the British government to direct the largest study ever conducted into the reality of global warming and the possible ways of remedying it. Backed by full government resources, Stern answers the most urgent questions of our time: what will be the cost of global warming - and what can we do about it?

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in this critical history of U.S. policy on migration in the Global South, there is actually no such thing as a "climate refugee" under current U.S. law. Most initiatives intended to assist those who must migrate are flawed and ineffective from inception because they are derived from outmoded policies. In a world of climate change, U.S. refugee policy simply does not work.

Amni wakes up one morning to find the sky taken over by a huge brown cloud. Even as she and her friends start to discover more, their city of Mumbai starts reeling from the changes the cloud brings to the weather. Bhura Cloudus (as the media calls it) causes scalding rain to fall, makes birds flee the city, and suffocates every living thing. As chaos continues to build and the climate changes brought by Bhura become disastrous, there are several questions on everyone’s mind: What will the powerful politician, Mota Bhai, do now?

The Renewable Way is a plainspoken and comprehensive narrative of the causes and consequences of global warming and the renewable energy solutions we already have for making a better world free of fossil fuels. This book will be informative to anyone interested in addressing the climate crisis. And if you, or someone you know, is likely to listen to only one book on this subject, this is the book.

In 2015, a group of young people sued the federal government for violating their constitutional rights by promoting the climate catastrophe, depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. They Knew offers evidence for their claims, presenting a devastating account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as an expert on climate, documents how administrations from Carter to Trump continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel-based energy system.

Sixteen-year-old climate activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and his group the Earth Guardians believe that choices made now will have a lasting impact on the world of tomorrow, and they want to ensure a positive, just, and sustainable future. Beginning with their empowering story, We Rise explores many aspects of effective activism and provides step-by-step information on how to start and join solution-oriented movements.

Beyond images of emaciated polar bears and drought-cracked lakes, there remains a major part of climate change's impact that the media has neglected: how our health will suffer from higher temperatures and extreme weather. From spiraling rates of asthma and allergies and spikes in heatstroke-related deaths to swarms of invasive insects carrying diseases like dengue or West Nile and increases in heart and lung disease and cancer, the effect of rising temperatures on human health will be far-reaching, and is more imminent than we think.

The big media have spoken on the question of global warming, and the debate is officially over. "Be afraid, be very afraid", warns Time magazine. But have Al Gore and his environmentalist allies really proven their case? Not even close, says Christopher C. Horner.

Melting ice, a military arms race, the rush to exploit resources at any cost - the Arctic is now the stage on which our future will be decided. And as temperatures rise and the ice retreats, Vladimir Putin orders Russia's oil rigs to move north. But one early September morning in 2013, 30 men and women from 18 countries - the crew of Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise - decide to draw a line in the ice and protest the drilling in the Arctic.

Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning, Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: Climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects.

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering.

Climate change manifests in many ways across America, but few as dramatic as the attacks on our western pine forests. In Trees in Trouble, Daniel Mathews tells the urgent story of this loss, accompanying burn crews and forest ecologists as they study the myriad risk factors and refine techniques for saving this important, limited resource.

Down to the Wire is a sober and eloquent assessment of climate destabilization and an urgent call to action. David Orr describes how political negligence, an economy based on the insatiable consumption of trivial goods, and a disdain for the well-being of future generations have brought us to the tipping point that biologist Edward O. Wilson calls "[T]he bottleneck".

Join us on a journey around the globe and meet the enthusiasts, technologies, and decision-makers that are proving that humans are indeed capable of saving us from ourselves. The challenges may be great, but there are a number of opportunities to stall climate change – perhaps even reverse it. This book offers a glimpse of how to do just that. It will explain how we can equip ourselves with food, clothing, shelter, energy, transport and all in all live good lives without negatively impacting the planet we live on. "If We Act Now" tells us about the barriers to action and how we can overcome them.

In the last few years, it has become abundantly clear that the effects of accelerating climate change will be catastrophic, from rising seas to more violent storms to desertification. Yet why do nation-states find it so difficult to implement transnational policies that can reduce carbon output and slow global warming? In Oceans Rise, Empires Fall, Gerard Toal identifies geopolitics as the culprit.