BOOKS on Climate Change

Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do
About It

Climate change is now doing far more harm than marooning polar bears on melting chunks of ice—it is damaging the health of people around the world. Brilliantly connecting stories of real people with cutting-edge scientific and medical information, Changing Planet, Changing Health brings us to places like Mozambique, Honduras, and the United States for an eye-opening on-the-ground investigation of how climate change is altering patterns of disease. Written by a physician and world expert on climate and health and an award-winning science journalist, the book reveals the surprising links between global warming and cholera, malaria, lyme disease, asthma, and other health threats. In clear, accessible language, it also discusses topics including Climategate, cap-and-trade proposals, and the relationship between free markets and the climate crisis. Most importantly, Changing Planet, Changing Health delivers a suite of innovative solutions for shaping a healthy global economic order in the twenty-first century.

The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change

An incredible wealth of scientific data on global warming has been collected in the last few decades. The history of the Earth's climate has been probed by drilling into polar ice sheets and sediment layers of the oceans' vast depths, and great advances have been made in computer modeling of our climate. This book provides a concise and accessible overview of what we know about ongoing climate change and its impacts, and what we can do to confront the climate crisis. Using clear and simple graphics in full color, it lucidly highlights information contained in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and brings the subject completely up-to-date with current science and policy. The book makes essential scientific information on this critical topic accessible to a broad audience. Obtaining sound information is the first step in preventing a serious, long-lasting degradation of our planet's climate, helping to ensure our future survival.

Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action

This meticulously documented call-to-action reveals extensive scientific evidence that the global warming crisis is far worse than officially indicated — and that we’re almost at the point of no return. Serious climate-change impacts are already happening: large ice-sheets are disintegrating, sea-level rises will reach 5 metres this century, and we are seeing devastating species loss.

It is no longer a case of how much more we can ‘safely’ emit, but whether we can stop emissions and produce a deliberate cooling before the Earth’s climate system reaches a point beyond any hope of human restoration.

These imperatives are incompatible with ‘politics as usual’ and ‘business as usual’ — we face a sustainability emergency that urgently requires a clear break from the politics of failure-inducing compromise.

Climate Change: Picturing the Science

An unprecedented union of scientific analysis and stunning photography illustrating the effects of climate change on the global ecosystem. Going beyond the headlines, this work by leading NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt and master photographer Joshua Wolfe illustrates as never before the ramifications of shifting climate. Photographic spreads show retreating glaciers, sinking villages in Alaska's tundra, and drying lakes. The text follows adventurous scientists through the ice caps at the poles to the coral reefs of the tropical seas. Marshaling data spanning centuries and continents, the book sparkles with cutting-edge research and visual records, including contributions from experts on atmospheric science, oceanography, paleoclimatology, technology, politics, and the polar regions. As Jeffrey D. Sachs writes in his powerful foreword, "Climate Change is a tour de force of public education."

Dire Predicitions

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been issuing the essential facts and figures on climate change for nearly two decades. But the hundreds of pages of scientific evidence quoted for accuracy by the media and scientists alike, remain inscrutable to the general public who may still question the validity of climate change.

Esteemed climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump, have partnered with DK Publishing to present Dire Predictions—an important book in this time of global need. Dire Predictions presents the information documented by the IPCC in an illustrated, visually-stunning, and undeniably powerful way to the lay reader. The scientific findings that provide validity to the implications of climate change are presented in clear-cut graphic elements, striking images, and understandable analogies.

Readers will be able to understand the IPCC reports’ key concepts such as scientific uncertainty. They will also learn how to build a climate model and use it to predict future climates. Geoforensics is presented as a way to learn from the past by piecing together clues from prior climates.

Eaarth

Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way.

Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.

That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend—think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we've managed to damage and degrade. We can't rely on old habits any longer.

Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.

The End of Nature

Reissued on the tenth anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the earth.

This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever. McKibben writes of our earth's environmental cataclysm, addressing such core issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. His new introduction addresses some of the latest environmental issues that have risen during the 1990s. The book also includes an invaluable new appendix of facts and figures that surveys the progress of the environmental movement.

More than simply a handbook for survival or a doomsday catalog of scientific prediction, this classic, soulful lament on Nature is required reading for nature enthusiasts, activists, and concerned citizens alike.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe

The world has known about global warming since the late 1970s, yet little has been done to halt it. The threat, if we fail, is nothing less than catastrophe - the flooding of coastal communities, the extinction of species and entry into a climate regime of which humans have no experience. Exploring the relationship between what we know and what we refuse to know, Elizabeth Kolbert takes us on an urgent journey from the Arctic to Central America, interviewing researchers, environmentalists and traditional Inuits whose lives have already been dramatically altered by climate change.

Global Warming Reader

This is a book for all of us: students, activists, Earthlings. Edited by perhaps the most widely-respected writer on the environment today, GWR is a comprehensive resource that collects seminal texts and voices on climate change from the phenomenon’s discovery in the late 19th century to the present.

What is happening to our planet—and what can we do about it? This collection, which includes criticism of the very concept of global warming (by doubters U.S. Sen. James Inhofe and Michael Crichton), attempts to answer these all-important questions.

Divided into three parts—Science, Politics, and Meaning—the book contains a transcript of NASA scientist James Hansen's testimony before the U.S. Congress; George Monbiot's biting, convincing indictment of who is really using up the planet's resources; Elizabeth Kolbert's groundbreaking essay “The Darkening Sea,” and excerpts from the work of Al Gore, Naomi Klein, and many others. Even in this age of electronic archives, GWR is essential, as much for Bill McKibben's selection and introductions as it is for its broad spectrum of content.

Including original introductory paragraphs to each selection by the editor.

Writing and testimony by: Savante Arrhenius, Sally Bingham, Adrienne Maree Brown, G.S. Callendar, Michael Crichton, Paul Crutzen & Eugene F. Stoermer, The Evangelical Climate Initiative, Ross Gelbspan, Al Gore, James Hansen, Mark Hertsgaard, James Inhofe, IPCC Working Group I, Van Jones, Naomi Klein, Elizabeth Kolbert, Jeff Masters, George Monbiot, Mohamed Nasheed, Naomi Oreskes, Billy Parish, Roger Revelle & Hans E. Suess, Arundhati Roy, Peter Schwartz & Doug Randall, Dr. Vandana Shiva, Mike Tidwell, and John Vidal.

Hell and High Water

Global warming is the story of the twenty-first century. It is the most serious issue facing the future of humankind, but American energy and environmental policy is driving the whole world down a path toward global catastrophe.

According to Joseph Romm, we have ten years, at most, to start making sharp cuts to our greenhouse gas emissions, or we will face disastrous consequences. The good news, he writes, is that there is something we can do—but only if the leadership of the U.S. government acts immediately and asserts its influence on the rest of the world.

Hell and High Water is nothing less than a wake-up call to the country. It is a searing critique of American environmental and energy policy, and a passionate call to action by a writer with a unique command of the science and politics of climate change.

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines

In its 2001 report on global climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations prominently featured the “Hockey Stick,” a chart showing global temperature data over the past one thousand years. The Hockey Stick demonstrated that temperature had risen with the increase in industrialization and use of fossil fuels. The inescapable conclusion was that worldwide human activity since the industrial age had raised CO2 levels, trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and warming the planet.

The Hockey Stick became a central icon in the “climate wars,” and well-funded science deniers immediately attacked the chart and the scientists responsible for it. Yet the controversy has had little to do with the depicted temperature rise and much more with the perceived threat the graph posed to those who oppose governmental regulation and other restraints to protect our environment and planet. Michael E. Mann, lead author of the original paper in which the Hockey Stick first appeared, shares the real story of the science and politics behind this controversy. He introduces key figures in the oil and energy industries, and the media front groups who do their bidding in sometimes slick, bare-knuckled ways to cast doubt on the science. Mann concludes with an account of the “Climategate” scandal, the 2009 hacking of climate scientists’ emails. Throughout, Mann reveals the role of science deniers, abetted by an uninformed media, in once again diverting attention away from one of the central scientific and policy issues of our time.

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

While everything appears to be collapsing around us — ecodamage, genetic engineering, virulent diseases, the end of cheap oil, water shortages, global famine, wars — we can still do something about it and create a world that will work for us and for our children’s children. The inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio’s web movie Global Warning, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight details what is happening to our planet, the reasons for our culture’s blind behavior, and how we can fix the problem. Thom Hartmann’s comprehensive book, originally published in 1998, has become one of the fundamental handbooks of the environmental activist movement. Now, with fresh, updated material and a focus on political activism and its effect on corporate behavior, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight helps us understand--and heal--our relationship to the world, to each other, and to our natural resources.

The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate

If you think that global warming means slightly hotter weather and a modest rise in sea levels that will persist only so long as fossil fuels hold out (or until we decide to stop burning them), think again.

In The Long Thaw, David Archer, one of the world's leading climatologists, predicts that if we continue to emit carbon dioxide we may eventually cancel the next ice age and raise the oceans by 50 meters. The great ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland may take more than a century to melt, and the overall change in sea level will be one hundred times what is forecast for 2100. By comparing the global warming projection for the next century to natural climate changes of the distant past, and then looking into the future far beyond the usual scientific and political horizon of the year 2100, Archer reveals the hard truths of the long-term climate forecast.

Archer shows how just a few centuries of fossil-fuel use will cause not only a climate storm that will last a few hundred years, but dramatic climate changes that will last thousands. Carbon dioxide emitted today will be a problem for millennia. For the first time, humans have become major players in shaping the long-term climate. In fact, a planetwide thaw driven by humans has already begun. But despite the seriousness of the situation, Archer argues that it is still not too late to avert dangerous climate change--if humans can find a way to cooperate as never before.

Revealing why carbon dioxide may be an even worse gamble in the long run than in the short, this compelling and critically important book brings the best long-term climate science to a general audience for the first time.

Rough Winds: Extreme Weather and Climate Change

For the last few years, and especially in 2011, a new extreme weather event seems to pop up each week. Some decide to stick around: Texas and Oklahoma have been suffering from historic droughts for six months, with no sign of relief. No sooner does Hurricane Irene disappear than Tropical Storm Lee appears to flood Louisiana and stir up wildfires in nearby Texas. We seem beset by more, and more extreme, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, torrential rainstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and blizzards than any of us can remember. Are we witnessing just the normal ups and downs of the weather or is the climate changing? This book arms readers with the facts about the recent extreme weather so that they can answer that question for themselves.

Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity

An urgent and provocative call to action from the world's leading climate scientist-speaking out here for the first time with the full story of what we need to know about humanity's last chance to get off the path to a catastrophic global meltdown, and why we don't know the half of it. In STORMS OF MY GRANDCHILDREN, Dr. James Hansen, the nation's leading scientist on climate issues, speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: the planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although Hansen was Al Gore's science advisor for An Inconvenient Truth, his recent data shows that our situation is even more dire today. But politicians haven't made the connection between the policy and the science. He shows why Gore's solution, cap and trade, won't work, why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon is a goal we must achieve in the next two decades if our grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown and the storms of the book's title. This urgent manifesto bucks conventional wisdom (including the Kyoto Protocol) and is sure to stir controversy, but Hansen-whose climate predictions have come to pass again and again, beginning in the 1980s when he first warned Congress about global warming-is the single most credible voice on the subject worldwide.

Hansen paints a devastating but all-too-realistic picture of what will happen in the next year, and ten years from now if we follow the course we're on. But he is also an optimist, showing that there is still time to do what we need to do. Urgent, strong action is needed, and this book, released just before the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009, will be key in setting the agenda going forward to create a groundswell, a tipping point, to save humanity-and our grandchildren--from a dire fate more imminent than we had supposed.

Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet

Dr. Heidi Cullen, one of the world’s foremost climatologists and environmental journalists, offers a new way of viewing the climate-change phenomenon, not as some future event but as something happening right now in our own backyard. In this groundbreaking, provocative work, Dr. Cullen combines the latest scientific research with state-of-the-art climate-model projections to create climate-change scenarios for seven of the most at-risk locations around the globe.

From the Central Valley of California, where coming droughts will jeopardize the entire state’s water supply, to New York City, whose infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to even a relatively weak Category 3 hurricane, to Greenland, where warmer temperatures will give access to mineral wealth buried beneath ice sheets for millennia, Cullen illustrates how, if left unabated, climate change will transform every corner of the world by midcentury—and no two regions will be affected in quite the same way.

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

An international best seller embraced and endorsed by policy makers, scientists, writers, and energy industry executives from around the world, Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers helped bring the topic of global warming to national prominence. For the first time, a scientist provided an accessible and comprehensive account of the history, current status, and future impact of climate change, writing what has been acclaimed by reviewers everywhere as the definitive book on global warming.

With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to extinction by the levels of greenhouse gases that will accumulate in the next few decades, we are reaching a global climatic tipping point. The Weather Makers is both an urgent warning and a call to arms, outlining the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do to prevent a cataclysmic future. Originally somewhat of a global warming skeptic, Flannery spent several years researching the topic and offers a connect-the-dots approach for a reading public who has received patchy or misleading information on the subject. Pulling on his expertise as a scientist to discuss climate change from a historical perspective, Flannery also explains how climate change is interconnected across the planet.

Along with a riveting history of how climate change has shaped our planet’s evolution, Flannery offers specific suggestions for action for both lawmakers and individuals, from investing in renewable power sources like wind, solar, and geothermal energy, to offering an action plan with steps each and every one of us can take right now to reduce deadly CO2 emissions by as much as 70 percent.

With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change

Nature is fragile, environmentalists often tell us. But the lesson of this book is that it is not so. The truth is far more worrying. Nature is strong and packs a serious counterpunch... Global warming will very probably unleash unstoppable planetary forces. And they will not be gradual. The history of our planet's climate shows that it does not do gradual change. Under pressure, whether from sunspots or orbital wobbles or the depredations of humans, it lurches-virtually overnight. —from the Introduction

Fred Pearce has been writing about climate change for eighteen years, and the more he learns, the worse things look. Where once scientists were concerned about gradual climate change, now more and more of them fear we will soon be dealing with abrupt change resulting from triggering hidden tipping points. Even President Bush's top climate modeler, Jim Hansen, warned in 2005 that "we are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption."

As Pearce began working on this book, normally cautious scientists beat a path to his door to tell him about their fears and their latest findings. With Speed and Violence tells the stories of these scientists and their work-from the implications of melting permafrost in Siberia and the huge river systems of meltwater beneath the icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica to the effects of the "ocean conveyor" and a rare molecule that runs virtually the entire cleanup system for the planet.

Above all, the scientists told him what they're now learning about the speed and violence of past natural climate change-and what it portends for our future. With Speed and Violence is the most up-to-date and readable book yet about the growing evidence for global warming and the large climatic effects it may unleash.