Climate Science

A Brief History of the Earth's Climate is an accessible, myth-busting guide to the natural evolution of the Earth's climate over 4.6 billion years, and how and why human-caused global warming and climate change is different and much more dangerous. It covers the major historical climate change processes, as well as recent human-induced climate change and the implications of the COVID pandemic for climate change. It is an essential listen for everyone who is looking to understand what drives climate change, counter skeptics and deniers, and take action on the climate emergency.

World leaders have made a forceful statement that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century. However, little progress has been made in implementing policies to address climate change. In Climate Uncertainty and Risk, eminent climate scientist Judith Curry shows how we can break this gridlock.

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.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the book’s first publication, David Attenborough has revisited Life on Earth, completely updating and adding to the original text, taking account of modern scientific discoveries from around the globe....

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest? In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse.

Nowhere on our planet is devoid of life. Plants and animals thrive or survive within every extreme of climate and habitat that it offers. Single species, and often whole communities, adapt to make the most of ice cap and tundra, forest and plain, desert, ocean and volcano. These adaptations can be truly extraordinary. In Living Planet, David Attenborough’s searching eye, unfailing curiosity and infectious enthusiasm explain and illuminate the intricate lives of the these colonies.

The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about. Climate change, the depletion of oil, economic upheaval, and mass extinction together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face this crisis so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power

In The Big Melt, Rolling Stone contributing editor and leading environmental journalist Jeff Goodell takes the listener up close and personal to one of the world’s most remote locations—Western Antarctica—and to the foot of the staggeringly important Thwaites Glacier.

False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong. It points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.

This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back.

The enormity of climate change and biodiversity loss can leave us feeling overwhelmed. How can an individual ever make a difference? Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell know firsthand how spectacularly nature can bounce back if you give it the chance. And what comes is not just wildlife in super-abundance, but solutions to the other environmental crises we face. The Book of Wilding is a handbook for how we can all help restore nature.

The world is being shaken by the collision of energy, climate change, and the clashing power of nations in a time of global crisis. The "shale revolution" in oil and gas - made possible by fracking technology, but not without controversy - has transformed the American economy, ending the "era of shortage", but introducing a turbulent new era. Almost overnight, the United States has become the world's number one energy powerhouse - and, during the coronavirus crisis, brokered a tense truce between Russia and Saudi Arabia.

We face a potent intersection of crises: ecological destruction, rising inequality, racial injustice, and the lasting impacts of a devastating pandemic. The situation is beyond urgent. To face these challenges, we need to find ways to strengthen our clarity, compassion, and courage to act. Beloved Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh is blazingly clear: There’s one thing we all have the power to change, which can make all the difference, and that is our mind.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.

In an illuminating analysis, Dr. Genevieve Guenther shows that the climate debate is not, in fact, neatly polarized, with Republicans obstructing climate action and Democrats advancing climate solutions. Partisans on the right and the left often repeat the same fossil-fuel talking points, and this repetition produces a centrist consensus upholding the status quo, even as global heating accelerates. Weaving this analysis through fascinating critical histories of the terms that dominate the language of climate politics Dr. Guenther shows how this consensus is established.

Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history.

It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.

2080: At a remote site on the edge of the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists, engineers, and physicians gather to gamble humanity’s future on one last-ditch experiment. Their goal: to make a tiny alteration to the past, averting a global catastrophe while at the same time leaving recorded history intact. To make the experiment work, they just need one last recruit: an ageing schoolteacher whose late mother was the foremost expert on the mathematics of paradox. 2028: A young woman goes into surgery for routine brain surgery.

Merchants of Doubt has been praised—and attacked—around the world, for reasons easy to understand. This book tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data and poetry, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take—from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer—to create.