Environment

BOOKS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

This book must not be ignored. It really is our final warning.

Mark Lynas delivers a vital account of the future of our earth, and our civilisation, if current rates of global warming persist. And it’s only looking worse.

We are living in a climate emergency. But how much worse could it get? Will civilisation collapse? Are we already past the point of no return? What kind of future can our children expect? 

Publisher is Harper Collins.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.

An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.

Published by Penguin Random House 

Confronting harsh ecological realities and the multiple cascading crises facing our world today, An Inconvenient Apocalypse argues that humanity’s future will be defined not by expansion but by contraction.

For decades, our world has understood that we are on the brink of an apocalypse—and yet the only implemented solutions have been small and convenient, feel-good initiatives that avoid unpleasant truths about the root causes of our impending disaster. Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen argue that we must reconsider the origins of the consumption crisis and the challenges we face in creating a survivable future. Longstanding assumptions about economic growth and technological progress—the dream of a future of endless bounty—are no longer tenable. The climate crisis has already progressed beyond simple or nondisruptive solutions. The end result will be apocalyptic; the only question now is how bad it will be.

Published by University of Notre Dame Press

IPCC & Scientific Assessment

Still no evidence against the hypothesis that we are headed for 4 deg. C. This latest article reinforces my original speculation about that. – Is climate change speeding up? Here’s what the science says. – https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/26/global-warming-accelerating-climate-change/

  • Screenshot of a former interactive graph of future climate projections based on different human emission pathways. The graph shows the average of a set of temperature simulations for the 20th century (black line), followed by projected temperatures for the 21st century based on a range of emissions scenarios (colored lines). The shaded areas around each line indicate the statistical spread (one standard deviation) provided by individual model runs. (Data processing by Jay Hnilo, CICS-NC, using data courtesy the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP3.)
  • Extrapolate the graph: We’re headed for 4 deg. C. before widespread human calamity kicks in and takes down the human economy that produces all those emissions. Bottom line: humans aren’t going to scale back emissions to any significant degree.  It’s the forced collapse of the global human economy (and civilization) that will finally result in reduced emissions. Unless, of course, humans don’t nuke themselves out of existence before then. 

Doubling Down

4-8-25: Doubling Down: The US seems to be reversing course on renewable energy vehicles (I have serious doubts about the long term ecological benefits of EV’s.) The message here in this story is: “To hell with environmental sustainability! Back to the good old days! Everything will be just fine!”  (Except when some of those good old fossil fuel vehicles get washed down the river in the latest “once in a generation” flood in Kentucky and Tennessee, of all places. – https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/04/03/ev-factories-canceled/

1-10-25 Doubling Down: This story from the NYT just serves to illustrate that the Chimps are unwilling, if not unable, to cut emissions. What they are willing to do is to talk a good game. –

Wildfires

Earth Mother is making new converts, one group at a time. Now that She visited a vigorous dose of forest fire smoke upon the East Coast, I detect a new attitude in the East Coast press: a much more apocalyptical tone. ‘The fire equivalent of an ice age’: Humanity enters a new era of fire – https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/06/10/canadian-wildfire-smoke-pyrocene/

Mojave Desert wildfire threatens California’s iconic Joshua trees – https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/mojave-desert-wildfire-threatens-californias-iconic-joshua-trees

The worst fire season in Canada's history – https://video.kqed.org/video/august-18-2023-pbs-newshour-full-episode-1692331201/

Damage to Oceans & Increasing Pollution

Dought and Water Shortages

Flooding

Extreme Weather

September 1, 2024 Extreme heat caused by climate change is causing electric bills to skyrocket. This is causing people to divert larger portions of their income to just staying cool. Another offshoot of climate change which is an offshoot of ecological overshoot – https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/american-households-struggle-with-sky-high-energy-bills-during-extreme-summer-heat

4 dead, 10 injured after tornado rips through Texas town – https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/06/22/matador-texas-tornado-storm-deaths/

Melting Glaciers & Sea Level Rise

Extinctions & Loss of Biological Diversity

 

Pandemics

Pandemics are a result of ecological overshoot and the destruction of nature (and the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a serious disruption of the global supply chain. This is a strong  and convincing exhibit of the effects of ecological overshoot.