Featured Books & eBooks - Climate Change
The Uninhabitable Earth: life After Warming by Call Number: GF75 .W36ISBN: 9780525576709Publication Date: 2019It 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. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, "500-year" storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually. This is only a preview of the changes to come. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable as soon as the end of this century. In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe.
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by ISBN: 9780143130444Publication Date: 2017In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and activists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and methods are described here—some are well known, some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in the developing world to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path toward not just slowing the earth's warming, but actually reaching drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being-giving us every reason to seize our planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.
Making Climate Change History: Documents From Global Warming's Past by ISBN: 9780295741383Publication Date: 2017This collection pulls together key documents from the scientific and political history of climate change, including congressional testimony, scientific papers, newspaper editorials, court cases, and international declarations. Far more than just a compendium of source materials, the book uses these documents as a way to think about history, while at the same time using history as a way to approach the politics of climate change from a new perspective. Making Climate Change History provides the necessary background to give readers the opportunity to pose critical questions and create plausible answers to help them understand climate change in its historical context; it also illustrates the relevance of history to building effective strategies for dealing with the climatic challenges of the future.
Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau's Woods by Call Number: QH105.M4P75ISBN: 9780226682686Publication Date: 2014In his meticulous notes on the natural history of Concord, Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau recorded the first open flowers of highbush blueberry on May 11, 1853. If he were to look for the first blueberry flowers in Concord today, mid-May would be much too late. In Walden Warming, Richard B. Primack uses Thoreau and Walden, icons of the conservation movement, to track the effects of a warming climate on Concord's plants and animals. Under Primack’s attentive watch, the notes that Thoreau made years ago are transformed from charming observations into scientific data sets, which demonstrate that climate change is already here, and it is affecting not just Walden Pond but many other places in Concord and beyond.
The White Planet: The Evolution and Future of Our Frozen World by Call Number: QC981.8.I23 J6813ISBN: 9780691144993Publication Date: 2013From the Arctic Ocean and ice sheets of Greenland to the glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas, way south to the great frozen desert of Antarctica, The White Planet takes readers on a spellbinding scientific journey through the shrinking world of ice and snow to tell the story of the expeditions and discoveries that have transformed our understanding of global climate. Written by three internationally renowned scientists at the center of many breakthroughs in ice core and climate science, this book provides an unparalleled firsthand account of how the "white planet" affects global climate—and how, in turn, global warming is changing the frozen world.
Quicklist
Lord, Nancy. Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North. (2011) - GF504.A4 L67
Wormworth, Janice. Winged Sentinels: Birds and Climate Change. (2011) - QL698.95 .W67
Berlatsky, Noah. Water & Ice. (2011) - QC903 .C68
Black, Brian. Global Warming. (2010) - QC903 .B53
Reay, Dave; Pete Smith; & André van Amstel. Methane & Climate Change. (2010) - eBook
Philander, George (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Global Warming & Climate Change. (2008) - QC981.8.G56 E47
Walker, Gabrielle & Sir David King. Hot Topic: What We Can Do About Global Warming. (2008) - QC981.8.G56W35
Henderson, Mark. The 21st Century Environmental Revolution: A Comprehensive Strategy For Conservation, Global Warming, And The Environment / The Fourth Wave. (2008) - GE105 .H45
Monbiot, George. Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. (2007) - QC981.8.G56 M62
Gore, Albert. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. (2006) - QC981.8.G56 G67
Ehleringer, james; Thure Cerling; & M. Denise Dearing. History of Atmospheric CO2 & Its Effects on Plants, Animals & Ecosystems. (2005) - eBook
Field, Christopher & Michael Raupach. Global Carbon Cycle: Integrating Humans, Climate & the Natural World. (2004) - eBook
Alley, Richard. The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Updated Ed.). (2000) - QC884 .A55
Christianson, Gale. Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming. (1999) - QC981.8.G56 C48
Web Resources
Security & Sustainability Forum. Drawdown – 60 Minutes with Paul Hawken. (2017)
Security & Sustainability Forum. The Fourth National Climate Assessment and Outcomes from the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn. (2017)
Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by ISBN: 9781786634290Publication Date: 2018How climate change will affect our political theory--for better and worse Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading? To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathan provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world's political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative.
Climate Change in Human History: Prehistory to the Present by Call Number: GF71 .L54ISBN: 9781472598493Publication Date: 2018Climate Change and Human History provides an up-to-date and concise introduction to the relationship between human beings and climate change throughout history. Starting with periods hundreds of thousands of years ago and continuing up to the present day, the book illustrates how natural climate variability affected early human societies, and how humans are now altering climate drastically within much shorter periods of time. An ideal companion for all students of environmental history, Climate Change and Human History clearly demonstrates the critical role of climate in shaping human history and of the experience of humans in both adapting to and shaping climate change.
How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate by Call Number: QC903.2.U6 H64ISBN: 9780804794220Publication Date: 2015Though the scientific community largely agrees that climate change is underway, debates about this issue remain fiercely polarized. These conversations have become a rhetorical contest, one where opposing sides try to achieve victory through playing on fear, distrust, and intolerance. At its heart, this split no longer concerns carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or climate modeling; rather, it is the product of contrasting, deeply entrenched worldviews. This brief examines what causes people to reject or accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Synthesizing evidence from sociology, psychology, and political science, Andrew J. Hoffman lays bare the opposing cultural lenses through which science is interpreted. He then extracts lessons from major cultural shifts in the past to engender a better understanding of the problem and motivate the public to take action.
Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories form the Front Lines of Climate Change by Call Number: QC903.2.U6 M34ISBN: 9780292756618Publication Date: 2015While pundits on the left and right argue, in the vast middle are ordinary people dealing with stronger storms and more intense droughts than they've ever known. This middle ground is the focus of Betting the Farm on a Drought, a lively, thought-provoking book that lays out the whole story of climate change—the science, the math, and most importantly, the human stories of people fighting both the climate and their own deeply held beliefs to find creative solutions to a host of environmental challenges. Seamus McGraw takes us on a trip along America's culturally fractured back roads and listens to farmers and ranchers and fishermen, many of them people who are not ideologically, politically, or in some cases even religiously inclined to believe in man-made global climate change. He shows us how they are already being affected and the risks they are already taking to deal with extreme weather and its consequences for their livelihoods.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Call Number: HC79.E5 K56ISBN: 9781846145056Publication Date: 2014In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.
Quicklist
Stoknes, Per Espen & Jorgen Randers. What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action. (2015) - BF353.5.C55 S76
Howe, Joshua. Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming. (2014) - QC981.8.G56 H69
Guzman, Andrew. Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change. (2013) - QC903 .G895
Carbon Capture and Storage: Efficient Legal Policies for Risk Governance & Compensation by ISBN: 9780262337311Publication Date: 2017Carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems inject highly compressed carbon dioxide gas deep into geological formations in order to contain the gas for the foreseeable future and beyond—for centuries or even millennia. Used effectively, CCS could lessen the impact of climate change while carbon-free energy sources are developed. And yet CCS is not widely deployed. In this book, Michael Faure and Roy Partain offer a theoretical and practical discussion of one of the main obstacles to CCS adoption: complex liability and compensation issues. Faure and Partain point out that current liability rules are unclear in their application to CCS. Causation is complicated and the timeline of hundreds of years goes beyond the lifetimes of people or corporations. Examining the subject from legal and economic perspectives, they consider whether rules of civil liability can govern CCS risk; how a liability system might address the open-ended timeline; what role public and private regulatory measures could play; and whether compensation should be provided from public or private resources.
Clean Energy, Climate and Carbon by Call Number: QE516.C37 C66ISBN: 9780415621069Publication Date: 2012With the general reader in mind, Clean Energy, Climate and Carbon outlines the global challenge of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the need to decrease carbon dioxide, the global use of fossil fuels is increasing and is likely to continue to do so for some decades to come. With this in mind, the book looks at the range of clean energy technologies related to carbon capture and storage (CCS). How can we capture carbon dioxide from flue gases? How can we transport it? How can we store it in suitable rocks? This book investigates the technological questions associated with CCS and navigates the political environment in which these discussions must take place.
Quicklist
Bruges, James. Biochar Debate: Charcoal's Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility. (2010) - S663 .B78
Lombardi, S.; L.K. Altunina; & S.E. Beaubien (Eds.). Advances in the Geological Storage of Carbon Dioxide: International Approaches to Reduce Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas Emissions. (2006) - eBook
Web Resources
Security & Sustainability Forum. Profit From Capturing Methane Emissions. (2019)
Security & Sustainability Forum. Reframing Carbon Capture and Reuse. (2018)