Earths Climate

With seven million early deaths a year linked to air pollution, air quality is headline news around the world. But even though we breathe in and out every few seconds, few of us really know what’s in the air all around us. In Every Breath You Take, air-quality specialist - and full-time breather - Dr. Mark Broomfield connects the dots from the atmosphere on distant planets to the holes in the ozone layer to the particles in our lungs.

As scientific and observational evidence on global warming piles up every day, questions of economic policy in this central environmental topic have taken center stage. But as author and prominent Yale economist William Nordhaus observes, the issues involved in understanding global warming and slowing its harmful effects are complex and cross disciplinary boundaries. For example, ecologists see global warming as a threat to ecosystems, utilities as a debit to their balance sheets, and farmers as a hazard to their livelihoods.

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.

In his new book Meltdown, Jorge Daniel Taillant takes listeners deeper into the cryosphere, connecting the dots between climate change, glacier melt, and the impacts that receding glacier ice brings to livability on Earth, to our environments, and to our communities. Taillant walks us through the little-known realm of the periglacial environment, a world of invisible subsurface rock glaciers that will outlive exposed glaciers as climate change destroys surface ice.

Climate change is with us, and we need to think about the next big disturbing idea - the potentially disastrous consequences of massive numbers of environmental refugees at large on the planet. In 2020, the United Nations projects that we will have 50 million environmental refugees mostly from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How will people be relocated and settled? Is it possible to offer environmental refugees temporary or permanent asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit?

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?

In brave and unforgettable terms, Al Gore, the passionate and lifelong defender of the environment, describes how human actions and decisions can endanger or safeguard the vulnerable ecosystem that sustains us.

From wood to coal to oil and gas, the sources of energy on which civilization depends have always changed as technology advances. Now renewables are overtaking fossil fuels, with wind and solar energy becoming cheaper and more competitive every year. Growth in renewable energy will further accelerate as electric vehicles become less expensive than traditional automobiles. Understanding the implications of the energy transition will prepare us for the many changes ahead.

As climate change continues to intensify, the outlook for life on Earth often seems bleak. Yet hope for the future can be found in the “rescue effect,” which is nature’s innate ability to help organisms persist during hard times. Like a thermostat starting the air conditioning when a room gets too warm, the rescue effect automatically kicks in when organisms are stressed or declining. In The Rescue Effect, Michael Mehta Webster reveals the science behind nature’s inherent resilience, through compelling stories of species that are adapting to the changing world.

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.

Every year, droughts, floods, and fires impact hundreds of millions of people and cause massive economic losses. Climate change is making these catastrophes more dangerous. Now. Not in the future: now. This book describes how and why climate change is already fomenting dire consequences and will certainly make climate disasters worse in the near future.

"Our Choice gathers in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now and that, together, will solve this crisis. It is meant to depoliticize the issue as much as possible and inspire readers to take action - not only on an individual basis but as participants in the political processes by which every country, and the world as a whole, makes the choice that now confronts us." (Al Gore, from the Introduction)

Utah has long claimed to have the greatest snow on Earth - the state itself has even trademarked the phrase. In Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth, Jim Steenburgh investigates Wasatch weather, exposing the myths, explaining the reality, and revealing how and why Utah’s powder lives up to its reputation. Steenburgh also examines ski and snowboard regions beyond Utah, making this book a meteorological guide to mountain weather and snow climates around the world.

Journalist Jelmer Mommers knows most people prefer not to talk or even think about climate change, and that is exactly why he wrote this book. Denial and despair are not the only possible responses to the current crisis. Drawing on the latest science, Mommers describes how we got here, what possible future awaits us, and how you can help make a difference.

Having spent over a decade on the frontlines of climate activism - organising, campaigning, and holding the powerful to account - Tamsin Omond discovered first-hand that this crisis is too big for one group of activists to solve. It needs everyone. Do Earth is about collective action and community engagement. It's about healing our relationships with nature, each other and ourselves, and feeling inspired about what the next phase of human evolution might be.

Meteorologist and Peabody Award-winning journalist Bonnie Schneider looks at how climate change is already threatening our mental and physical health and offers helpful tips to tackle these challenges.

Produced by Climate Central — a highly regarded, independent, nonprofit journalism and research organization founded in 2008 — and reviewed by scientists at major educational and research institutions the world over, Global Weirdness summarizes, in clear and accessible prose, everything we already know about the science of climate change. It explains what is likely to happen to the climate in the future and lays out in practical terms what we can and cannot do to avoid further shifts.

The potential impact of runaway climate-change has long been grossly underestimated. The world is rapidly approaching an existential crisis—the Anthropogenic Extinction—the sixth annihilation of Earth-bound species since life first appeared 3.5 billion years ago. Assisted by teammates Eric Evans and Bella Moreno, and Thay Tuan, the team’s consigliere, Luc Ponti, now an astrophysicist at MIT, succeeds in creating a stabilized micro-wormhole, which is launched by NASA into high-Earth orbit and used as a means to contact intelligent life on exoplanets well within the “Goldilocks” zone.

Earth is nearly 70 percent water. Most of this water is frozen in the form of glaciers. As our planet warms, glaciers are melting faster than usual. Sea levels rise, and water washes over coastal areas. Homes are destroyed. Habitats are lost.

In April 1970, twenty million people grabbed their rakes, gloves, and recycling bins to celebrate the first Earth Day. Since that environmental kickoff, nature has never been in better shape. RIGHT? WRONG! The real deal is a bit muddier than that. It’s true that the first Earth Day encouraged people around the globe to clean up their act when it came to the environment. But activists have been working for centuries to save the planet! Join the History Smashers team to bust history's biggest misconceptions and figure out what really went down before (and after!) the first Earth Day.