Earths Climate

When we talk about human history, we often focus on great leaders, population forces, and decisive wars. But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming. Mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece. Atmospheric circulation patterns later on shaped the progression of global exploration, colonization, and trade. Even today, voting behavior in the southeast United States ultimately follows the underlying pattern of 75 million-year-old sediments from an ancient sea.

We live at the bottom of an ocean of air - 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer - 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm - at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate.

For the last 50 years, the trees of the boreal forest have been moving north. The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming planet from Norway to Siberia, Alaska to Greenland, to meet the scientists, residents, and trees confronting huge geological changes.

Wagner and Martin Weitzman explore in lively, clear terms the likely repercussions of a hotter planet, drawing on and expanding from work previously unavailable to general audiences. They show that the longer we wait to act, the more likely an extreme event will happen. A city might go underwater.

All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States - scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race - and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society.

In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place—in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor. In A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, Henry Gee zips through the last 4.6 billion years with infectious enthusiasm and intellectual rigor.

Like it or not, global warming is a hot topic, and it will affect the younger generation the most. So why not turn to the teacher kids like the most, Ms. Frizzle! Only the Friz can boil all the hoopla down to the scientific facts in a fun and informative way. Kids already love the Magic School Bus, and the love to do what's right by the planet. At last, a way to teach the curriculum and make an impact!

Providing a post-COP26 perspective on the climate emergency, Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide acknowledges that it is now practically impossible to keep this side of the 1.5°C dangerous climate change guardrail. The upshot is that we can no longer dodge the arrival of a disastrous, all-pervasive climate breakdown that will come. Bill McGuire explains the science behind the climate crisis, painting a blunt but authentic picture of the sort of world our children will grow old in, and our grandchildren grow up in, a world that we catch only glimpses of today.

From wind and rain to tornadoes and hurricanes, weather is a powerful force in our world. Discover how weather changes the world we live in and how scientists learn about its impact on our daily lives.

Facing directly into the devastation of climate chaos and biodiversity loss, Rampy leads her listeners on a soul journey through grief and loss to also claim the beauty, joy and possibilities available when we reconnect with Earth. As we follow the author’s compelling personal experiences and engagingly lyrical stories of whales, cedars, sparrows, and more, we see the necessity and urgency of learning from the wisdom of our kin in the natural world.

The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought, and the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093. Dramatizing science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, The Collapse of Western Civilization reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do, providing a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate-change literature.

In Storms of My Grandchildren, 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 adviser for the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, his recent data shows that our situation is even more dire today.

The science is overwhelming; the facts are in. The planet is heating up at an alarming rate and the results are everywhere to be seen. Yet, as time runs out, climate progress is blocked by the men who are profiting from the burning of the planet: energy moguls like the Koch brothers and Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Powerful politicians like Senators Mitch McConnell and Jim Inhofe, who receive massive contributions from the oil and coal industries. Most of these men are too intelligent to truly believe that climate change is not a growing crisis.

From Dr. Tim Flannery, one of the world's foremost experts on conservation and ecology, comes a book of immeasurable importance. Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as a "powerful and persuasive" work that is "sure to provoke strong reaction", The Weather Makers is among the finest examinations of climate change ever written.

Why should you care about climate change? Weather affects your everyday life and climate change can have major impacts. Discover how scientists study climate change, what current research shows, and what you can do to reverse its effects.

Humanity is on the precipice of a great climate migration, and Americans will not be spared. Tens of millions of people are likely to be driven from the places they call home. Poorer communities will be left behind, while growth will surge in the cities and regions most attractive to climate refugees. America will be changed utterly.

Max Axiom and the Society of Super Scientists go on an exciting, fact-filled adventure that will help young listeners learn about the causes and effects of climate change and learn ways that they can make a difference.

Learn the science behind weather and weather prediction in this clear and straightforward new guide. Weather is everywhere, and while it's typically not thought about most of the time, it can get everyone's attention in an instant - whether it's the swirling destruction of a tornado, the wreckage from a hurricane, or the havoc of climate change on the environment.

NASA Astrobiologist and renowned scientist Dr. David Grinspoon brings listeners an optimistic message about humanity's future in the face of climate change. For the first time in Earth's history, our planet is experiencing a confluence of rapidly accelerating changes prompted by one species: Humans. Climate change is only the most visible of the modifications we've made - up until this point, inadvertently - to the planet. And our current behavior threatens not only our own future but that of countless other creatures.

Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Giulio Boc­caletti - honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Univer­sity of Oxford - shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civ­ilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers.