Climate Change Science

Pandemic, climate change, or war: Our era is ripe with the odor of doomsday. In movies, books, and more, our imaginations run wild with visions of dreadful, abandoned cities and returning to the land in a desperate attempt at survival. In The Next Apocalypse, archaeologist Chris Begley argues that we completely misunderstand how disaster works. Examining past collapses of civilizations, such as the Maya and Rome, he argues that these breakdowns are actually less about cataclysmic destruction than they are about long processes of change.

In the case of the recent virus, the most ideal carrier animal is a bat or snake. Since humans don’t consume snakes and bats in several areas of the world but in some places like China they are consumed, it is suspected that the new outbreak is linked to the consumption of an infected bat. The same is the cause for other virus outbreaks in the past.

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.

Since the late 1800s, global average temperature has increased by 2.1°F (1.2°C). Over the last 100 years, the global sea level has risen by about 8 in (20 cm). Do you find it hard to translate climate change figures like these to the real world? The statistics and science are always in the news, but unless your life and livelihood are affected, it’s difficult to truly appreciate the significant impact behind the numbers.

Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule from their lofty perch at the top while the rest are crammed into the dark, fetid floors below sea level.

It is not your imagination: water crises are more frequent. Our twentieth-century systems for providing the water that grows food, sustains cities, and supports healthy ecosystems are failing to meet the demands of growing population and the challenges brought on by climate change. But the grim news reports—of empty reservoirs, withering crops, failing ecosystems—need not be cause for despair, argues award-winning author David Sedlak.

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.

Pick an environmental issue. Maybe air pollution, toxic waste, or deforestation. These all seem like solid choices, but none of these is actually an environmental problem—at least, not at its heart. Deep down, they are economic problems. Nearly all the issues we classify as environmental stem from defects in the DNA of America's current market system. This is emphatically true of our greatest environmental threat: global warming. With a focus on climate change, journalist and author Robert S. Devine reveals the fundamental flaws in the economy that enable environmental degradation.

The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It’s a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet behind these quotidian interactions is one of the most expansive machines human beings have ever constructed - a triumph of science, technology, and global cooperation. But what is this "weather machine" and who created it?

Following the death of her mother in a horrifying wildfire, seventeen-year-old Kora wants to ensure that not one more child loses a parent to a traumatic climate event. As the most severe possible projected climate change outcomes actually happen in real-time, rapid action is needed. But is it too late? What can a female, bi-racial, teenager with untapped superpowers do? How about saving the planet? Empowered by her supernatural abilities, Kora embraces her destiny as EcoQueen, the superhero of a new generation, whom the world so desperately needs.

This book is the first of its kind to examine the role of great powers in the international politics of climate change. It develops a novel analytical framework for studying environmental power in international relations, what counts as a great power in the environmental field, and what their special environmental responsibilities are. In doing so, the book connects International Relations (IR) debates on power inequality, great powers and great power management, with global environmental politics (GEP) scholarship.

The Psychology of Climate Change explores the evidence for our changing environment, and suggests that there are significant cognitive biases in how we think about, and act on climate change. The authors examine how organisations have attempted to mobilise the public in the fight against climate change, but these initiatives have often failed due to the public’s unwillingness to adapt their behaviour.

The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain--and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away.

In this highly original work of lyrical reportage, Elizabeth Rush guides listeners through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish in place. Weaving firsthand accounts from those facing this choice with profiles of wildlife biologists and other members of the communities both currently at risk and already displaced, Rising privileges the voices of those usually kept at the margins.

From former New York Times Science writer Tatiana Schlossberg comes Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have, a fascinating and unexpectedly entertaining look at the way climate change and environmental pollution are intimately involved in our everyday life - in everything we use, buy, eat, wear, and how we get around - and have consequences that extend far beyond our lives.

Take a walk through the climate regions of the world and discover the effect of climate change on plants and how plants are coping in changing climatic conditions. As extreme weather conditions take over our planet, what will be their effect on plants? How can plants cope with these changing conditions? Which plants already survive in extreme and changing environments?

The ice sheets and glaciers that cover one-tenth of Earth's land surface are today in grave peril. High in the Alps, Andes, and Himalaya, once-indomitable glaciers are retreating, even dying. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, thinning glaciers may be unlocking vast quantities of methane stored for millions of years beneath the ice. In Ice Rivers, renowned glaciologist Jemma Wadham offers a searing personal account of glaciers and the rapidly unfolding crisis that they - and we - face.

One of the biggest problems mankind faces today is one of our own making: Climate change. While this continues to be debated by climate deniers even today, one cannot ignore the effect that it so obviously has on our communities and the natural world surrounding them. In this age of rampant wildfires and melting icecaps, the youth of today are striving tirelessly to make their voices heard. Throughout this audiobook, we will detail the efforts these young people are undertaking in order to ensure that the planet will continue to sustain us for generations to come.

Discussion of the climate crisis has always suffered from a problem of abstraction. Data points and warnings of an overheated future struggle to break through the noise of everyday life. Deniers often portray climate solutions as inconvenient, expensive, and unnecessary. And many politicians, cloistered by status and focused always on their next election, do not yet see climate as a winning issue in the short run. But climate change is here whether we want to pay attention or not.

Rowan is finally in Harmonia, an Earth-friendly, sustainable commune in the wilderness she always thought was dead. Even in this idyllic world, she finds no peace. Harmonia has strict rules - and dire consequences. Thinking about Eden is forbidden, but she’s determined to rescue the loved ones she left behind. Though her friends are in terrible danger, her pleas for help are ignored. A shocking reminder of her past pushes Rowan to act. With help from new friends, she infiltrates Eden. What she discovers is even worse than the situation she left behind.