From global warming’s threats to its potential solutions, from wildfires, droughts, floods and whirling hurricanes to melting ice caps and ever-rising sea levels,these new books examine how we got here and where we’re going.

‘The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future’
If you need to quickly get up to speed with the sheer scale of the climate emergency, journalist David Wallace-Wells’s succinct but brutal portrait of our future lives on earth may be for you. In 200 pages, it deftly unpacks the different dimensions of our forecast doom, from heat death to unbreathable air.
Even for those who feel they are well-versed on the issue, the relentless litany of calamities that have or could be caused by global warming effectively shakes the reader out of any complacency. As Wallace-Wells’s puts it in the book’s first line “it is worse, much worse, than you think”.
While those looking for solutions will be disappointed, the book does offer hope that we already have all the tools we need to avoid the worst effects. But ultimately The Uninhabitable Earth seeks to clarify the horror of the emergency. Unless we accept the urgency, how can we expect to get ourselves out of this mess?

‘The Case for the Green New Deal’
After decades of climate inaction, many environmentalists have come to the conclusion that the globalised capitalist system needs to be fundamentally overhauled to solve the crisis. Their answer is a Green New Deal (GND).
If you’ve heard of the GND but are still not quite sure how it could address the climate crisis, Ann Pettifor’s book is a good place to start. The economist is one of the academics and activists who devised the first GND more than a decade ago in response to the 2008 financial crash. Since then she has gone on to advise congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who helped revive the GND framework and introduce a resolution in US Congress.
The Case for the Green New Deal outlines the broad principles of this plan to tackle both the climate emergency and inequality simultaneously. Crucially, Pettifor debunks the idea that we could not afford to fund such a plan, arguing that the state is capable of financing a zero-emissions programme if constraints are put on moving capital.
The book points to periods of history when money has been no object to determined governments, from the Marshall Plan to the moon landings. Pettifor asks us to consider: “How can we bail out the banks but not the planet?”

‘The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History’
The role of the climate emergency in driving the extinction of up to half the world’s species by 2050 is laid bare in Elizebeth Kolbert’s reporting from the frontlines of environmental breakdown. There have been five mass extinction events over the past half a billion years, but this sixth extinction looks set to be the fastest on record.
Kolbert explores the possibility of our impending doom on the animals already gone or at the point of vanishing; from the Panamanian golden frog nearly completely wiped out in the wild by a fungal disease to the Maui, “the most beautiful bird in the world”, in peril due to deforestation.
We are driving these species to extinction in many ways: some connected to the climate crisis through rising sea levels rising and deforestation, as well as by spreading disease-carrying species and poaching. By fundamentally altering earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems, we are risking our own future too. Kolbert says the choice is clear: “Adapt our thinking or die.”

‘Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change’
Part of the tragedy of the climate crisis is that we have known about it for decades and yet done nothing about it. Losing Earth recounts the decisive decade from 1979 to 1989 when we first had a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of global warming. Focussing mainly on the US’s response to the crisis, the book follows the scientists and activists who tried to sound the alarm, and the Reaganite politicians and big businesses who made sure that no meaningful action was taken.
Essayist and novelist, Nathaniel Rich, argues that we came tantalisingly close to signing binding international treaties that would have stopped the acceleration of the global emergency. But by the start of the Nineties, what was once regarded as a bipartisan issue came to be seen as a partisan one after the oil industry “descended and bared its fangs”.
In the decades since, more carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere than in all the preceding years of history of civilisation. If you believe that in order to change the future we must understand the past, Losing Earth is an essential cautionary tale for facing the climate battles ahead.

‘On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal’
While some argue that we missed a crucial opportunity to stop climate change in the Eighties, Naomi Klein posits that “the zenith of the neoliberal crusade” was exactly the wrong moment for bold action. In her collection of environmental essays, written over the past decade, Klein pins the blame for the crisis on capitalism and argues that nothing will be realised without systems change.
On Fire features a diverse selection of Klein’s reporting on the frontlines of climate breakdown, from post-hurricane Puerto Rico to the bleached Great Barrier reef. But a clear thread runs through them showing how our drive for endless growth and profits has engendered this emergency. Although less cohesive than Klein’s other book on the climate crisis, This Changes Everything, On Fire is her most recent work on this topic and is punctuated with useful footnotes that provide updates and reflections.
Klein also observes a new “unfamiliar sense of promise” in her latest title owing to the recent momentum behind the Green New Deal movement and the wave of school strikes led by Greta Thunberg. On Fire leaves the reader with the hope that tackling the climate crisis offers a unique opportunity to transform society and tackle wealth inequality, racism and declining public services.

‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable’
Novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that what lies at the heart of the climate crisis is a failure of imagination to confront a catastrophe we can’t see. He envisages that our great-grandchildren will look back at our current period as one of denial. In Ghosh’s extended essay, he critiques the involvement of culture makers in this collective denial.
At a time when we need to face the apocalyptic nature of the environmental crisis, fictional books are concerned more with the mundane and every day. But, unlike our ancient texts, the stories we tell today no longer wrestle with vast swathes of time and space needed to address the climate emergency.
Likewise, in politics, Ghosh argues that at the very time it is becoming clear that the situation is “in every sense a collective predicament”, we find ourselves living in the age of the individual. The Great Derangement is a reminder that there are no more vital tasks for writers, artists and politicians than to confront the existential environmental crisis we face and imagine new ways of living.

‘The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here’
A simple message lies at the centre of geochemist Hope Jahren’s sweeping examination of how we found ourselves in the middle of a climate crisis: “Use less and share more”. The Story of More explores how the ingenuity that has allowed humans to extract ever more resources from the Earth has also set the stage for environmental catastrophe. What’s more, this rampant consumerism is costing us our happiness too. The only way to solve one problem, Jahren suggests, is to solve both.
The Story of More illustrates the enormous scale of human consumption through compelling statistics. Jahren highlights the developed world’s responsibility for the crisis by observing that if everyone consumed resources on the same scale as the US, carbon dioxide emissions would be more than four times higher. This book does not pummel readers with a sense of guilt, but asks how we can learn to live on a finite planet. “Using less and sharing more is the biggest challenge our generation will ever face,” she says.

‘Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming’
By now the existential danger posed by the climate crisis is clear to anyone who’s been paying attention, but what about the solutions? Drawdown pulls together leading scientists and policymakers to present the 100 most effective solutions to the climate emergency using only peer-reviewed research.
These experts predict that if these resolutions are deployed collectively on a global scale over the next 30 years, we could reach the point where greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begin to decline, known as drawdown.
Items on the list are ranked based on the potential amount of greenhouse gases they can avoid or remove – moderating use of air-conditioners and refrigerators are number one. Essentially a reference book, Drawdown is a good guide to have on hand to make sense of the broad suite of solutions we need to tackle the climate crisis.

The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming
Billed as “the first hopeful book about climate change.” Holthaus, a meteorologist turned climate journalist, explores several major scenarios under which we could get to carbon-zero over the next three decades and save the planet. Along the way he also encourages another radical idea: that we relearn how to embrace the Earth and our relationship with it — and maybe our relationship with ourselves along the way.

Health of People, Health of Planet and Our Responsibility: Climate Change, Air Pollution and Health
A wide-ranging, open-access (as in free) academic book addressing how climate change damages peoples’ health, covering everything from the cardiovascular effects of air pollution to the ethics of climate justice. There are even chapters about how the climate crisis will affect our mental health and religious faiths. Edited by Wael K. Al-Delaimy, Veerabhadran Ramanathan and Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, with dozens of contributors from around the world, the book is available for download in its entirety or on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World edited
In this hybrid book of nonfiction, fiction, essays and poems, an all-star lineup of international writers addresses how climate change will exacerbate the gap between rich and poor around the world and put millions of people at greater risk. Margaret Atwood, Anuradha Roy, Lauren Groff and Chinelo Okparanta are among the notable contributors.

The Hidden Life of Ice: Dispatches from a Disappearing World
A noted climate scientist takes us on a journey to Greenland to discuss its melting beauty and the secrets that researchers are uncovering beneath the ice. Part science book, part history lesson, part travelogue, this book puts the reader on the front line to illuminate the climate crisis and what we’re losing in the process. Co-written by journalist Alberto Flores d’Arcais; Elizabeth Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction) provides the foreword.

The Ministry for the Future
From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a remarkable vision of climate change over the coming decades. The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us — and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written

All We Can Save
Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
Provocative and illuminating essays from women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward. There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it’s clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it’s a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone.

Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal
The Political Economy of Saving the Planet
Climate change: watershed or endgame? In this compelling new book, Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading public intellectual, and Robert Pollin, a renowned progressive economist, map out the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change—and present a realistic blueprint for change: the Green New Deal. Together, Chomsky and Pollin show how the forecasts for a hotter planet strain the imagination: vast stretches of the Earth will become uninhabitable, plagued by extreme weather, drought, rising seas, and crop failure.

What Can I Do?
My Path from Climate Despair to Action
A call to action from Jane Fonda, one of the most inspiring activists of our time, urging us to wake up to the looming disaster of climate change and equipping us with the tools we need to join her in protest”This is the last possible moment in history when changing course can mean saving lives and species on an unimaginable scale. It’s too late for moderation.”In the fall of 2019, frustrated with the obvious inaction of politicians and inspired by Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein, and student climate strikers, Jane Fonda moved to Washington, D.C., to lead weekly climate change demonstrations on Capitol Hill.

Commanding Hope
The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril
From the #1 BESTSELLING thought leader: Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science and even Lord of the Rings, Thomas Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink.For three decades, the renowned author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, and The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?, has examined the threats to our future security–predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course.

A Good War
Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency
One of Canada’s top policy analysts provides the first full-scale blueprint for meeting our climate change commitments Contains the results of an exclusive national poll on Canadians’ attitudes to the climate crisis Shows that radical climate crisis transformation can bring jobs and prosperity as we retool how we live and work Deeply researched and targeted specifically to Canada and Canadians while providing a model that other countries could follow “This is a truly great book. Few people have thought as deeply or with as much precision about the climate crisis as Seth Klein.

Winning the Green New Deal
Why We Must, How We Can
An urgent and definitive collection of essays from leaders and experts championing the Green New Deal—and a detailed playbook for how we can win it—including contributions by leading activists and progressive writers like Varshini Prakash, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Bill McKibben, Rev William Barber II, and more. In October 2018, scientists warned that we have less than 12 years left to transform our economy away from fossil fuels, or face catastrophic climate change. At that moment, there was no plan in the US to decarbonize our economy that fast.

The Outlaw Ocean
Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier
“The Outlaw Ocean is a riveting, terrifying, thrilling story of a netherworld that few people know about, and fewer will ever see. As Ian Urbina ventures into the darkest folds of the high seas, his courage–and his prose–are breathtaking. The soul of this book is as wild as the ocean itself.”–Susan Casey, best-selling author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the OceanA riveting, adrenaline-fueled tour of a vast, lawless and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas.There are few remaining frontiers on our planet.

The Hidden Life of Ice
Dispatches from a Disappearing World
For most of us, the Arctic is a vast, alien landscape; for research scientist Marco Tedesco, it is his laboratory, his life’s work—and the most beautiful, most endangered place on Earth. Marco Tedesco is a world-leading expert on Arctic ice decline and climate change. In The Hidden Life of Ice, he invites us to Greenland, where he and his fellow scientists are doggedly researching the dramatic changes afoot.

We Are the Weather
Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
This program is read by the author. In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. Some people reject the fact, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, that our planet is warming because of human activity. But do those of us who accept the reality of human-caused climate change truly believe it? If we did, surely we would be roused to act on what we know.

False Alarm
How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet
The New York Times-bestselling “skeptical environmentalist” argues that panic over climate change is causing more harm than goodHurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world. Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it’s not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is.

The Uninhabitable Earth
Life After Warming
“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 DemonWith a new afterwordIt 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.

Losing Earth
A Recent History
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change―including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon―the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world.

The 100% Solution
After running a campaign focused on climate change, Solomon Goldstein-Rose was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature in 2016 at the age of 22. He served one term and then turned to climate activism full time. In this concise book, he draws on his experiences to draft a five-pillar framework for reaching negative carbon emissions by 2050.
Because most new emissions come from rapidly developing countries, solutions must be economically viable for everyone, Goldstein-Rose points out. He argues that a “World War II–style mobilization” of technology development can get us there. Central to his plans, which he claims are feasible to achieve in the next 30 years, are scaling up nuclear power, improving battery storage and rolling out “greener” industrial processes.

A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety
If thinking about climate change makes you (a) depressed, (b) worried, (c) guilty or (d) all of the above, this book might be for you. Drawing on her expertise as an environmental humanities scholar, Sarah Jaquette Ray outlines how environmentally conscious citizens can cultivate a healthy mind-set and strong interpersonal relationships for taking action on climate change.
To deal with climate change–related fear and sadness, she suggests mindfulness practices. To avoid burnout, she advocates setting attainable goals, like reducing personal emissions or collaborating on environmental projects with local community members.
Emotional intelligence is important for engaging with other people’s feelings about climate change, too. Ray reminds readers that people react to information based more on how they feel about the messenger than the message. So prioritize building trust and common ground — perhaps by focusing on local issues or framing climate change as a public health problem — over simply winning debates with skeptics.

Beyond Global Warming
In 1894, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius made a startling announcement. His calculations suggested that a two- or threefold increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide could alter global temperatures on a scale comparable to the difference between cold glacial and warm interglacial periods.
Climate scientists have since devised increasingly complex models to understand humans’ impact on climate, weaving together observations and equations to simulate changes on land, in the oceans and in the atmosphere (SN: 1/7/20). Climate modeler Syukuro Manabe and atmospheric scientist Anthony J. Broccoli describe the evolution of these models.
Packed with data and graphs, and based on a graduate course taught by Manabe, the book is not a light read. But it gives an in-depth, science-rich understanding of this crucial field.

The Burning Question: We Can’t Burn Half the World’s Oil, Coal and Gas. So How Do We Quit?
‘The Burning Question’ reveals climate change to be the most fascinating scientific, political and social puzzle in history. It shows that carbon emissions are still accelerating upwards, following an exponential curve that goes back centuries. One reason is that saving energy is like squeezing a balloon: reductions in one place lead to increases elsewhere. Another reason is that clean energy sources don’t in themselves slow the rate of fossil fuel extraction.
Tackling global warming will mean persuading the world to abandon oil, coal and gas reserves worth many trillions of dollars – at least until we have the means to put carbon back in the ground. The burning question is whether that can be done.

Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change
By 1979, we understood nearly everything we know today about climate change – including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.

The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future
It is worse, much worse, than you think.
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.

How to Give Up Plastic
Plastics are everyone’s problem, and unless we as individuals, governments and companies all share responsibility, we won’t solve ever solve it. In this book, Will McCallum, head of oceans at Greenpeace UK, frames the current state of global plastic pollution and the environmental consequences of our throwaway, single-use culture. Part history, part guide, “How to Give Up Plastic” helps us understand our plastics addiction while giving us practical, ambitious steps to correct it.

The Uninhabitable Earth
Need to get up-to-speed on our climate emergency? “The Uninhabitable Earth” may be the book for you. In 200-odd pages, columnist and editor David Wallace-Wells deftly unpacks the past, present and future of life in the time of anthropogenic global warming. Remarkably, Wallace-Wells’s prose manages to convey not only the urgency (and anxiety) of our environmental crisis, but the opportunity we still have to seize the solutions right in front of us and turn things around. First you’ll get scared straight; then you’ll get straight to work.