Climate Science

Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history.

In 1956, the New York Times prophesied that once global warming really kicked in, we could see parrots in the Antarctic. In 2010, when science deniers had control of the climate story, Senator James Inhofe and his family built an igloo on the Washington Mall and plunked a sign on top: AL GORE'S NEW HOME: HONK IF YOU LOVE CLIMATE CHANGE. In The Parrot and the Igloo, bestselling author David Lipsky tells the astonishing story of how we moved from one extreme (the correct one) to the other.

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."

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.

Earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanoes - they stem from the same forces that give our planet life. Earthquakes give us natural springs; volcanoes produce fertile soil. It is only when these forces exceed our ability to withstand them that they become disasters. Together they have shaped our cities and their architecture; elevated leaders and toppled governments; influenced the way we think, feel, fight, unite, and pray. The history of natural disasters is a history of ourselves.

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've been "saving the planet" for decades...and environmental crises just get worse. All this hybrid driving and LEED building and carbon trading seems to accomplish little to nothing - and low-income communities continue to suffer the worst consequences. Why aren't we cleaning up the toxic messes and rolling back climate change? And why do so many Americans hate environmentalists? Jenny Price says Enough already! with this short, fun, fierce manifesto for an environmentalism that is hugely more effective, a whole lot fairer, and infinitely less righteous.

The enormity of climate change and biodiversity loss can leave us feeling overwhelmed. How can an individual ever make a difference? Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell know firsthand how spectacularly nature can bounce back if you give it the chance. And what comes is not just wildlife in super-abundance, but solutions to the other environmental crises we face. The Book of Wilding is a handbook for how we can all help restore nature.

Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet's epic 4.6 billion-year story. Placing 21st-century climate change in deep context, A Brief History of Earth is an indispensable look at where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Nowhere on our planet is devoid of life. Plants and animals thrive or survive within every extreme of climate and habitat that it offers. Single species, and often whole communities, adapt to make the most of ice cap and tundra, forest and plain, desert, ocean and volcano. These adaptations can be truly extraordinary. In Living Planet, David Attenborough’s searching eye, unfailing curiosity and infectious enthusiasm explain and illuminate the intricate lives of the these colonies.

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.

By 2045, the progression of the Hot has disrupted lives around the world. Sea levels have risen. Much of the Arctic permafrost has melted. Shortages of food and water are widespread. Cattle, pigs, and other domestic and wild animals must keep moving north to survive. Mammoths have been cloned as a meat resource, but they aren’t reproducing. Corn, rice, and wheat wither on the stalk. Oklahoma is too hot to grow grains. People in China are starving. Communities in Canada already see the disastrous results of the warm winters and melting permafrost. Can the efforts of these families solve ...

Sometimes, that which we strive for winds up having a life of its own and spins out of our control. For decades, climate activists have warned us of green-house gases, specifically CO2, potentially being harmful to our planet and even our species. What if … they get what they wanted? Not only do they convince most of the world’s population and leaders to move completely to non-CO2 producing energy, but they also go even further and achieve mandates to decrease global CO2 levels to unpreceded lows using various methods of atmospheric manipulation. So, they get what they wanted, but to a ...

When it comes to climate-change-inspired threats, it is rising sea levels we hear most about. But if the oceans are, as Herman Melville put it, “the tide-beating heart of the Earth”, rivers are its circulatory system. In the United States, there is no river more storied, symbolic, and vital than the Mississippi, and none, to use Mark Twain’s word, more lawless. The struggle to control it has been going on nearly as long as there has been human civilization on its banks, and the attendant drama and dangers have been memorialized by many writers.

TAOLISM: The Architecture of Life A Clear, Timeless Code for Personal and Planetary Well-Being In an age of rising chaos, disconnection, and climate crisis, TAOLISM offers something rare: clarity. This is not a religion. It is not dogma. It’s a grounded framework for ethical, sustainable living—rooted in science, reason, and real-world consequence. The word TAOLISM comes from the acronym TAOL—The Architecture of Life—a term that reflects the foundational structure of existence itself. TAOLISM is a call to align our behavior with the reality we inhabit. At its heart are seven ...

Why would someone who cares so deeply about ecological change want to stop talking about it now? At Work in the Ruins is the book that grew out of Dougald’s attempt to answer that question. He delves deeply into what he discovered during the globally shared isolating Covid moment, why the virus and the measures taken against it drove so many of us to despair, and how we can re-find our bearings if the pandemic is not the big event that changes everything but simply one in a chain of emergencies that are bringing about the end of the world as we knew it.

Barely inhabited, the Arctic is an alien world to most of us. It also holds critical clues about the future of our planet. In The Hidden Life of Ice, Marco Tedesco invites us to Greenland, where he and his fellow scientists are doggedly researching the dramatic changes afoot. Following the arc of his typical day at work, Tedesco unearths the secrets in the ice - from evidence of long-extinct "polar camels" to the fantastically weird microorganisms. Tedesco weaves together the bald facts on climate change with poetic reflections on this endangered landscape and more.

What will become of our self-destructed planet? The answer shatters all expectations in this subversive speculation from the Hugo Award - winning author of the Broken Earth trilogy. An explorer returns to gather information from a climate-ravaged Earth that his ancestors, and others among the planet’s finest, fled centuries ago. The mission comes with a warning: A graveyard world awaits him. But so do those left behind - hopeless and unbeautiful wastes of humanity who should have died out ages ago.

In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion's share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world's megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk.

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.