It's time to heed the warnings...Drought and fires consume the Western US, while rains and floods damage the Eastern US. The world is experiencing more extreme weather, new volcanic eruptions, and disappearing marine and animal life. Authors and books have been reporting and predicting needs for action. Here are a few titles to read for awareness:
Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas published 2020
Journalist and author of Six Degrees and High Tide published in 2008, Mark Lynas, brings us a book that must not be ignored. It really is our final warning.
We are living in a climate emergency. But how much worse could it get? Will civilization collapse? Are we already past the point of no return? What kind of future can our children expect? Rigorously cataloging the very latest climate science, Mark Lynas explores the course we have set for Earth over the next century and beyond. Degree by terrifying degree, he charts the likely consequences of global heating and the ensuing climate catastrophe.
At one degree – the world we are already living in – vast wildfires scorch California and Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the Arctic ice cap melts away, and coral reefs disappear from the tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food, threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are too hot for human habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate refugees. At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the threat of the end of all life on Earth.
These escalating consequences can still be avoided, but time is running out. We must largely stop burning fossil fuels within a decade if we are to save the coral reefs and the Arctic. If we fail, then we risk crossing tipping points that could push global climate chaos out of humanity’s control.
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert published 2021
The author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change re-issued 2015 first published in 2006 and The Sixth Extinction published in 2014, returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it?
In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. She meets scientists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single, tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave. She visits a lava field in Iceland, where engineers are turning carbon emissions to stone; an aquarium in Australia, where researchers are trying to develop “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and a lab at Harvard, where physicists are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back to space and cool the earth.
One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush published 2019
With every passing day, and every record-breaking hurricane, it grows clearer that climate change is neither imagined nor distant—and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways. In Rising, Elizabeth Rush guides readers 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 testimonials from those facing this choice—a Staten Islander who lost her father during Sandy, the remaining holdouts of a Native American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles, a neighborhood in Pensacola settled by escaped slaves hundreds of years ago—with profiles of wildlife biologists, activists, and other members of these vulnerable communities, Rising privileges the voices of those too often kept at the margins.
In a new afterword for the paperback edition, Rush highlights questions of storytelling, adaptability, and how to powerfully shift conversation around ongoing climate change—including the storms of 2017 and 2018: Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, Irma, Florence, and Michael.
The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah coming in paperback September 2021
The news today is full of stories of dislocated people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands, creeping, swimming, and flying in a mass exodus from their past habitats. News media presents this scrambling of the planet’s migration patterns as unprecedented, provoking fears of the spread of disease and conflict and waves of anxiety across the Western world. On both sides of the Atlantic, experts issue alarmed predictions of millions of invading aliens, unstoppable as an advancing tsunami, and countries respond by electing anti-immigration leaders who slam closed borders that were historically porous.
But the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans tell a different story. Unhampered by barbed wire, migration catapulted us to the heights of the Himalayas and the isles of the Pacific. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Far from being a disruptive behavior to be quelled at any cost, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Migration is not the crisis: it is the solution.
Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change by Friederike Otto, translated by Sarah Pybus published Fall 2020
From a leading scientist, this gripping nonfiction book explains how recent weather disasters—including heat waves, massive forest fires, and floods—can be definitively linked to climate change, through the revolutionary method of World Weather Attribution.
Angry Weather tells the compelling, day-by-day story of Hurricane Harvey, which caused over a hundred deaths and $125 billion in damage in 2017. As the hurricane unfolds, Otto reveals how attribution science works in real time, and determines that Harvey’s terrifying floods were three times more likely to occur due to human-induced climate change.
This new ability to determine climate change’s role in extreme weather events has the potential to dramatically transform society—for individuals, who can see how climate change affects their loved ones, and corporations and governments, who may see themselves held accountable in the courts. Otto’s research laid out in this groundbreaking book will have profound impacts, both today and for the future of humankind.
Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis by Elin published in 2020
Fears about climate change are fueling an epidemic of despair across the world: adults worry about their children’s future; thirty-somethings question whether they should have kids or not; and many young people honestly believe they have no future at all.
In the face of extreme eco-anxiety, scholar and award-winning author Elin Kelsey argues that our hopelessness—while an understandable reaction—is hampering our ability to address the very real problems we face. Kelsey offers a powerful solution: hope itself.
Hope Matters boldly breaks through the narrative of doom and gloom to show why evidence-based hope, not fear, is our most powerful tool for change. Kelsey shares real-life examples of positive climate news that reveal the power of our mindsets to shape reality, the resilience of nature, and the transformative possibilities of individual and collective action. And she demonstrates how we can build on positive trends to work toward a sustainable and just future, before it’s too late.
READ. THINK. TAKE ACTION!
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