Perhaps the most important issue of our times, our effect on our natural world and questions of how to avert an impending cataclysmic disaster, might suggest a one-note list of doom and gloom. Instead, our rundown of 10 of the best of climate change books features rage and despair, yes, but also passionate, informed calls to action, incredible innovations in science and tech, and, ultimately, hope for better.
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
We start our list with a broad, evidence-based set of strategies from a wide-ranging group of experts. The Drawdown project takes in economics and education, as well as direct environmental interventions at scale. For anyone burnt out and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the problem, Drawdown offers practical help for individuals and businesses.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Best known for her incendiary work on The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, Klein takes direct aim once again at ‘creative destruction,’ the tactics deployed by large companies to engineer profits by stealth while populations struggle with local disasters. While not everyone may agree entirely with her assertion that action on climate change can’t work in a capitalist system, it generates much fuel for debate.
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
Wells expands on his New York Magazine article of the same name, using established science to predict what impact warming will have on human life as we know it. He argues that the interventions we make now won’t halt the progress of change entirely. Though Uninhabitable Earth makes for terrifying reading, there’s a glimmer of hope to mitigate the worst of the damage: rapid and ‘aggressive’ work on green energy and shifting to a more plant-based global diet.
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson
This earnest collection of poetry and essays highlights female education, action, and opinion, the first of these cited by several works on this list as a means to create lasting change. Dominated by well-known US voices, it suffers for a lack of input from other nations and cultures but does offer a robust counter to the crippling anxiety of much writing on this subject.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
Informed by the Microsoft founder’s years spent researching and investing in climate change initiatives, this work provides a handy rundown of what is being done now and what could be done in the future, exciting proposals on green energy sources, or even capturing and making use of greenhouse gas emissions, like making artificial limestone from carbon dioxide. He still asserts that while scientific progress is essential, real change can’t happen without political will.
The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
From a political strategist and diplomat, respectively, this work addresses in more detail that tricky political will, a fundamental barrier to meaningful efforts on climate change. Both helped lead negotiations for the UN during the Paris Agreement of 2015 and outlined 10 steps for government, companies, and individuals to recoup our failure to meet climate change targets set out by the agreement.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Kolbert’s work looks at our present climate crisis in the context of the earth’s long history of climate shake-ups, a rebuttal to the notion, long held by climate-change denialists, that present fluctuations in temperatures and sea levels are but another of the earth’s natural cycles, unrelated to human activity. Unlike many books on this list, she examines the effects on organisms other than humans: a diverse range of animal and plant life in several global habitats. The scale of predicted loss, in terms of the earth’s biodiversity, is undoubtedly depressing, but Kolbert emphasizes the importance of conserving species before they’re lost for good.
Under a White Sky
Kolbert records here her meetings with conservationists and scientists on the front lines with wit and optimism. She charts several astonishing initiatives, with the title coming from one truly innovative idea: launching tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to lower the earth’s temperatures, transforming our blue skies to white.
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Taking the long view, the incidents and obfuscations detailed here on the dangers of tobacco, DDT, and even lead in petrol still have the power to shock. Evidence on all, distorted and hidden, through acts of deliberate misinformation.
It’s, above all, a cautionary work: what happens when politics and the preservation of the free market (or extreme views of any kind) are permitted to influence scientific thought. It also proves a sad indictment of the diminution of scientific and critical thought in our society.
Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life
The central premise of Wilson’s final book in his trilogy might be the most radical on this list – that half the earth’s surface should be designated a human-free nature reserve. Wilson, a well-regarded biologist, frames the preservation of species in land and seas as an urgent moral issue, as well as the key to preserving our lives on this planet. Though a striking concept, Wilson’s book doesn’t delve too much into the practicalities of how this might be achieved.
