Climate Change
Fight Global Warming Now:
The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community by Bill McKibben
While Al Gore walked the red carpets in 2006, Bill McKibben, another climate catastrophe awareness trailblazer, walked across Vermont to foster a wider understanding of the crisis. Out of that trek grew Step It Up 2007, which is building a grassroots political movement to ensure that climate change be addressed in serious ways now. This book's a manual for those who would help build that movement. Says McKibben,
Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green economists, sustainability- minded engineers, and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, it's going to take the inspired political involvement of millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this problem. Linked up by the Internet and a common vision, we can start to make change from the local level to the national and global. We hope this book will give you the skills and inspiration you need to jump into this growing movement. It's hard work, but -- take it from us -- it can be a lot of fun, too.
Fight Global Warming Now ... published October 16, 2007 by Holt Paperbacks
Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren edited by Joseph F. C. DiMento and Pamela M. Doughman
Global climate change is a major societal issue that many citizens do not understand, do not take seriously, and do not consider to be a major public-policy concern. At most, as Bill McKibben notes in Granta, they think of climate change as they do of the trade deficit, violence, and television. ... Yet the scientific community, with the exception of a few contrarians, sees climate change as one of the major challenges facing society in the next decades. This book aims to make climate change understandable to the educated public.
This latest installment of the MIT Press series on American and Comparative Environmental Policy does that splendidly, featuring eight succinct and well-focused essays on various crucial aspects of climate change. Much of the work herein is by those affiliated in various ways with UC-Irvine. Contributors include earth systems prof John Abatzoglou, international environmental lawyer Stefano Nespor, science historian Naomi Oreskes and NY Times environmental reporter Andrew C. Revkin.
Climate Change ... published September 30, 2007 by The MIT Press
Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement edited by Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage
Though we may seem far from a serious, planetary effort to combat global warming, some of the basic mechanics of how that struggle must proceed are starting to come into focus. Editors Isham and Waage here present two dozen leading voices for finding the practical means to change our species' carbon-spewing ways. Among those voices is that of Bill McKibben, who concludes the book's introduction,
Twenty years ago climate change was hard to understand and obscure, but not anymore. ... [W]e've become accustomed to thinking that change is impossible, that forces on the other side are just too strong, that ExxonMobil will always carry the day. Indeed, we've intimidated ourselves into not even trying: at best, we try to work out "partnerships with industry." ... [H]istory indicates that the best partnerships happen when both sides have reason to be on board. Our job is to be noisy and joyful and footsore and clever and devoted enough to create that reason. Onward!
Ignition ... published July 30, 2007 by Island Press
Storm World by Chris Mooney
Is global warming producing larger, more destructive and more numerous hurricanes? After Katrina destroyed Mooney's mother's home in New Orleans, he went looking for links between climate change and hurricanes. What he found instead was a great deal of scientific doubt and complexity. The author's The Republican War on Science was snappier and more tightly edited than his current offering, but the true crime tenor of the former does tend to make for a livelier read than the scholarly ambiguity of the latter. On the other hand, Mooney's gotten uniformly high marks for the quality of his research, he's good at distilling scientific complexities for non-specialists, and his cast of human characters is fascinating -- if sometimes troubling -- on multiple levels. Politics and personality quirks, we see, sometimes play disproportionately large and unhelpful roles in doing and disseminating the science pertaining to global warming and hurricanes.
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD and mp3 CD
Storm World ... published July 2, 2007 by Harcourt
The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis
And the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock
An originator of the Gaia theory says that human-caused global warming has passed the point of no return. About all our species can do now is work together to save humankind on a planet that's about to become mostly uninhabitable. On a brighter note, Lovelock also thinks that we just might rise to our almost unimaginably grim challenge, much as he and his fellow Brits did in World War II:
One of the awful things I find today is that young people come to me and ask if there is any hope. Of course there's hope. At the moment, we are just waiting as we were in the 30s, when everyone knew war was coming but no one knew what to do about it. The moment the war started, we knew that the prospect was pretty awful, but there was a wonderful sense of purpose. There were no consumer goods, and food was strictly rationed. We never considered that time hopeless. When climate change gets bad, then there will be excitement, and that's the payoff. As Crispin Tickell said, what we need is leadership -- and disaster.
The Revenge of Gaia ... published July 3, 2006 by Basic Books
An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore
Al Gore's blockbuster climate change movie is accompanied by this snazzy, graphics-laden book. As some queue to touch the hem of his garment -- for the film, but also for his seemingly newfound passionate and funny sides -- others ask where the hell this guy was in 2000. And why no global warming focus then -- or during the Gore Vice Presidency? Says he:
I've been at this a long time. When I started having hearings and making speeches, and especially after I started giving the slide show in the late '80s, I felt that it would only be a matter of time before the message was received, and taken in by enough people so that there would be a big response. And after so many years of trudgin' around the country and around the world, givin' this thing, and still there's no action to solve it, you would feel the same way, I guarantee you.
There have been times in the past when I thought we were close to a tipping point, and I turned out to be wrong. I don't think I'm wrong this time.
An Inconvenient Truth ... published May 26, 2006 by Rodale
Field Notes from a Catastrophe:
Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert
A veteran journalist who wrote extensively about climate change for the New Yorker in 2005 looks at current climate science and observes that time's up: we make some radical changes now ... or else. No less than Bill McKibben -- he who placed the wakeup call on global warming -- has said of this volume, "It's among the few irreplaceable volumes yet written about climate change." Kolbert concludes,
With six billion people on the planet, the risks are everywhere apparent. A disruption in the monsoon patterns, a shift in the ocean currents, a major drought -- any one of these could easily produce streams of refugees numbering in the millions. As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD
Field Notes from a Catastrophe ... published March 7, 2006 by Bloomsbury USA
The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and
What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery
Flannery's urgent call for mending our climate-changing ways is rooted in the mountain of hard science he presents. The bottom line as far as the author's concerned (per one of his chapter titles): "Time's Up." Despite the great quantity and diversity of information he offers, Flannery keeps things readable, continually urging that we take action now to reduce greenhouse emissions:
The best evidence indicates that we need to reduce our CO2 emissions by 70 percent by 2050. If you own a four-wheel-drive and replace it with a hybrid fuel car, you can achieve a cut of that magnitude in a day rather than half a century. If your electricity provider offers a green option, for the cost of a daily cup of coffee you will be able to make equally major cuts in your household emissions. And if you vote for a politician who has a deep commitment to reducing CO2 emissions, you might change the world.
Also available on Audio CD
The Weather Makers ... first published February 28, 2006 by Atlantic Monthly Press
The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the
Destruction of Civilizations by Eugene Linden
An author who's "been writing about nature and the environment since the early 1970s" offers a wide-ranging consideration of climate change -- past, present, and future. In a field that often seems overpopulated with by specialists, Linden's a deeply grounded generalist -- and a polished writer -- who smoothly weaves many scientific and historic threads into a cogent tapestry that laypersons can see readily and with great clarity. In addition to explaining the various kinds of evidence that prove irrefutably that humans are causing climate change, Linden shows that dramatic climate changes have taken place repeatedly over the course of several million years of human and pre-human history. Previous changes, regional and global, have ended badly for humans who were blindsided by the upheavals. Linden says that our test is coming; we need to recognize that fact, understand what it means, and curb our climate-changing ways. Comfortable to read, comprehensive and concise.
Winds of Change ... published February 7, 2006 by Simon & Schuster
Thin Ice by Mark Bowen
A veteran mountaineer and magazine writer travels with and chronicles the findings of paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson, who's climbed to some of Earth's highest-altitude glaciers taking core samples key to the study of global warming. Bowen (who holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT) is sure-handed and highly readable as he documents Thompson's work and explains the fundamentals of global warming.
Despite the author's and his subject's impressive scientific credentials, Thin Ice is aimed at the layperson, and it provides an overwhelming body of evidence that the planet's current global warming is a) caused by humans; b) proceeding rapidly; and c) already changing the planet in fundamental ways -- with ever more catastrophic changes now becoming inevitable. Bowen decries President Bush's equivocation and inaction regarding global warming and asks, "Do we have to outpace the fry cycle of Snowball Earth -- average temperature 120º -- before we'll accept the idea that we might be the agents of change?"
Thin Ice ... first published October 13, 2005 by Henry Holt and Co.
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