Climate Engineering

As plants see it, humans are not the masters of the Earth but only one of its most unpleasant and irksome residents. They have been on the planet for only about 300,000 years ago (nothing compared to the three billon years of plant evolution) yet have changed the conditions of the planet so drastically as to make it a dangerous place for their own survival. It's time for the plants to offer advice.

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?

Warum wir zynische Geldmacher, egomane Politiker und deren Lügen bekämpfen müssen. Die Welt steckt in der Endphase eines Kulturkampfs: Gier gegen Gerechtigkeit, Zerstörung gegen Nachhaltigkeit, Zynismus gegen Empathie. Nichts zeigt dies deutlicher als die Reaktionen auf die Klimakatastrophe: Hier jene, die versuchen, das Schlimmste zu verhindern, dort jene, die alles tun, um aus dem Verbrennen fossiler Stoffe Profit zu ziehen.

In Escaping Nature, Orrin H. Pilkey and his coauthors offer concrete suggestions for how to respond to the threats posed by global climate change. They argue that while we wait for the world’s governments to get serious about mitigating climate change we can adapt to a hotter world through technological innovations, behavioral changes, nature-based solutions, political changes, and education.

Solving the world’s biggest problems - from climate catastrophe and pandemics to wildfires and corporate malfeasance - requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us. In The Spirit of Green, Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus describes a new way of green thinking that would help us overcome our biggest challenges without sacrificing economic prosperity, in large part by accounting for the spillover costs of economic collisions.

The notion of a living world is one of humanity’s oldest beliefs. Though once scorned by many scientists, the concept of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. Life not only adapts to its surroundings – it also shapes them in dramatic and enduring ways. Over billions of years, life transformed a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis, breathing oxygen into the atmosphere, concocting the modern oceans, and turning rock into fertile soil. Life is intertwined with Earth’s capacity to regulate its climate and maintain balance.

One cannot turn on the news today without a report on an extreme-weather event or the latest update on Antarctica. But while our politicians argue, the truth is that climate change is already here. Nobody knows this better than Indigenous peoples, who, having developed an intimate relationship with ecosystems over generations, have observed these changes for decades. For them, climate change is not an abstract concept or policy issue, but the reality of daily life.

Es la historia más vieja del mundo: la de un desastre medioambiental y una tecnología que nos salva. La hemos repetido como un mantra desde el principio de los tiempos porque hasta ahora se ha revelado cierta; somos el animal más peligroso de la sabana, hemos vencido a las bestias, a las tormentas y a la enfermedad. Pero la estrategia evolutiva que nos ha mantenido vivos desde el principio de la misma vida nos empuja ahora al borde de la extinción. Estamos tan atrapados que ya nos parece inevitable.

Stephen Hawkings Vermächtnis. Brillanter Physiker, revolutionärer Kosmologe, unerschütterlicher Optimist: Stephen Hawking beantwortet in seinem letzten Werk die drängendsten Fragen unserer Zeit und nimmt uns mit auf eine persönliche Reise durch das Universum seiner Weltanschauung. Seine Gedanken zu Ursprung und Zukunft der Menschheit sind zugleich eine Mahnung, unseren Heimatplaneten besser vor den Gefahren unserer Gegenwart zu schützen.

Flourishing in the Age of Climate Change explores skills we need to successfully navigate the distinctive environmental, social, and economic challenges of the twenty-first century. Our inability to address increasing resource constraints, social conflict, and ecological decline lead many toward a deep pessimism that saps motivation for change. Drawing on research from environmental science, ethics, psychology, sociology and educational theory, William M. Throop shows why cultivating underdeveloped skills can enable flourishing within our context.

From Joseph Romm, Chief Science Advisor for National Geographic's Years of Living Dangerously series and one of Rolling Stone's "100 people who are changing America," Climate Change offers user-friendly, scientifically rigorous answers to the most difficult (and commonly politicized) questions surrounding what climatologist Lonnie Thompson has deemed "a clear and present danger to civilization."

The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.

COVID-19, monkeypox, bird flu, SARS, HIV, AIDS, Ebola; we are living in the Age of Pandemics – one that we have created. As the climate crisis reaches a fever pitch and ecological destruction continues unabated, we are just beginning to reckon with the effects of environmental collapse on our global health. Fevered Planet exposes how the way we farm, what we eat, the places we travel to and the scientific experiments we conduct create the perfect conditions for deadly new diseases to emerge and spread faster and further than ever.

Michael P. Hoffmann, Carrie Koplinka-Loehr, and Danielle L. Eiseman offer an eye-opening journey through a complete menu of before-dinner drinks and salads; main courses and sides; and coffee and dessert. Along the way they examine the escalating changes occurring to the flavors of spices and teas, the yields of wheat, the vitamins in rice, and the price of vanilla. Their story is rounded out with a primer on the global food system, the causes and impacts of climate change, and what we can all do.

Spanning more than a century of Indian history, and decidedly transnational in reference, this audiobook offers rich resources for considering the threat of climate change today.

This audiobook is an updated edition of a guide to the basic science of climate change, and a call to action. The vast majority of scientists agree that human activity has significantly increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—most dramatically since the 1970s. Yet global warming skeptics and ill-informed elected officials continue to dismiss this broad scientific consensus. In this updated edition of his authoritative book, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel outlines the basic science of global warming and how the current consensus has emerged.

The Future We Choose is a passionate call to arms from former UN Executive Secretary for Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, and Tom Rivett-Carnac, senior political strategist for the Paris Agreement. We are still able to stave off the worst and manage the long-term effects of climate change, but we have to act now. We know what we need to do, and we have everything we need to do it.

Hoy, la subida del nivel del mar es una causa de alarma generalizada entre aquellos que ya han abandonado el sueño pernicioso de que el calentamiento global es un mito. Sin embargo, no es ni siquiera la punta del gigantesco iceberg de horrores inimaginables que amenazan la vida en la Tierra: incendios, huracanes, sequías, inundaciones...

The consequences of twenty-first-century sea level rise on the United States and its nearly 90,000 miles of shoreline will be immense: Miami and New Orleans will disappear; many nuclear and other power plants, hundreds of wastewater plants and toxic waste sites, and oil production facilities will be at risk; port infrastructures will need to be raised; and over ten million Americans fleeing rising seas will become climate refugees.

Heather White—known as "the Brené Brown of the environmental movement"—will show you how to contribute to the green lifestyle movement through self-discovery and joy. Your personality, interests, and strengths give you a unique role to play in the climate movement. Are you the Influencer? the Beacon? the Spark? the Sage? Once you identify your Service Superpower Profile, it's time to dive into the action and track your progress.