Climate Science

What if Atlantis wasn't a myth but an early precursor to a new age of great flooding? Across the globe, scientists and civilians alike are noticing rapidly rising sea levels and higher and higher tides pushing more water directly into the places we live, from our most vibrant, historic cities to our last remaining traditional coastal villages. With each crack in the great ice sheets of the Arctic and Antarctica and each tick upward of Earth's thermometer, we are moving closer to the brink of broad disaster.

How can people lead good lives without ultimately hastening global collapse? The answer lies in fairness. We can’t fight the climate and nature crises without addressing the ever-widening gaps between the rich and poor, the powerful and the weak. Drawing upon more than 40 years of experience in research, practical work, campaigning and advocacy, combined with interviews with globally renowned experts, in Just Earth Tony Juniper reveals the system shifts needed to achieve real, lasting change.

In this scientifically informed account of the changes occurring in the world over the last century, award-winning broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough shares a lifetime of wisdom and a hopeful vision for the future.

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before.

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.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: Climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects.

For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses map-like structures to build a model of the world - not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.

Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved our contemporary coastline—and foretell even greater changes to our shores. From the beaches of the Mexican border up to the sheer-cliffed North Coast, the voices of Indigenous leaders, community activists, small-town mayors, urban engineers, and environmental scientists commingle. Together, they chronicle the challenges and urgency of forging a climate-wise future.

Many of us have concerns about the effects of climate change on Earth, but we often overlook the essential issue of human health. This book addresses that oversight and enlightens listeners about the most important aspect of one of the greatest challenges of our time. By weighing in from a physician's perspective, authors Jay Lemery and Paul Auerbach clarify the science, dispel the myths, and help listeners understand the threats of climate change to human health.

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.

The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause. Capitalism demands perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: degrowth.

Threat Multiplier takes us onto the battlefield and inside the Pentagon to show how the US military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history: climate change. More than thirty years ago, Sherri Goodman became the Pentagon's first chief environmental officer. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the Department of Defense (DOD) was better known for containing the Soviet nuclear threat than protecting the environment.

On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life.

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.

Pacific Gas and Electric was a legacy company built by innovators and visionaries, establishing California as a desirable home and economic powerhouse. In California Burning, Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer finalist Katherine Blunt examines how that legacy fell apart—unraveling a long history of deadly failures in which Pacific Gas and Electric endangered millions of Northern Californians, through criminal neglect of its infrastructure.

Hundreds of years after the end of the world, the Appalachian community of Iron Hollow finds itself beset by demons. Such horrors are common these days in the outlands, where most folks die young—if they don’t turn into monsters first. When a legendary knight is summoned to hunt down the latest unearthly beast to haunt their woods, the town’s new oral historian, Shrike, has more reason than most to be concerned. Because that demon was her wife. And while Shrike is certain that May still recognizes her—that May is still herself, somewhere beneath it all—she can’t prove it.

Sand, iron, salt, oil, copper and lithium. The struggle for these tiny, magical materials has razed empires, demolished civilizations, fed our greed and our ingenuity for thousands of years. But the story is not over. We are often told we now live in a weightless world of information but in fact we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. And it's getting worse. To make one bar of gold, we now have to dig 5,000 tons of earth. For every tonne of fossil fuels, we extract six tonnes of other materials - from sand to stone to wood to metal.

A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability - and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?

We are living through a period that is unique in human history. For the first time in more than ten thousand years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. In the middle of this century population growth will stop, and the number of people on Earth will start to decline—fast. In this provocative book, award-winning science writer Henry Gee offers a concise, brilliantly told history of our species—and argues that we are on a rapid one-way trip to extinction.

We have long been taught that humanity’s relationship with energy is one of progress, with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear—until at some future point everything will be replaced by “green” energy. But the long-held belief in transition and sustainability is completely untrue, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues. More and More and More demolishes this disastrous fallacy, showing how our industrial age and beyond has in fact been powered by an ever-greater accumulation of each major energy source feeding off the others.