The year you finally read a book on climate change
Perhaps you prefer reading to escape reality, not confront it. But if the 50th anniversary of Earth Day has inspired you to decide that now is the time to pick up a book about climate change, we’re here to help you find the right one for you.
Here is a selection, categorized, by the editors of the Books and Climate desks for The New York Times.
A PLACE TO START: “What We Know About Climate Change,” Kerry Emanuel (nonfiction).
An MIT climatologist and a conservative, Emanuel sounds the alarm in a measured and scientifically sound way, making clear what we know and what we don’t know. There is little panic in this slender book, but there is a lot of troubling information.
Emanuel said he thought of his book specificallyas a way of offering ammunition to those trying to convince family members or friends who are skeptical or don’t understand the science.
FOR DENIERS: “Merchants of Doubt,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (nonfiction).
Two historians of science look at how science itself can be co-opted. They begin by looking at how the tobacco industry got scientists to refute studies that linked smoking and lung cancer, and move on to the pernicious role that right-wing think tanks have played in undermining the scientific data about acid rain and the ozone layer. The latest and perhaps most dangerous campaign has been against climate change.
Oreskes and Conway detail how little known but wellfunded groups like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have managed to sow doubt on behalf of industries that don’t have an interest in confronting global warming.
The authors have another warning: In the interest of balance, journalists have sometimes propagated ideas that are false and harmful, inadvertently helping to spread confusion.
HOW WE GOT HERE: “The End of Nature,” Bill McKibben (nonfiction).
McKibben wrote this book in 1989 when global warming was still referred to with the more innocuous sounding phrase “the greenhouse effect.” It was an abstract worry in the future even for environmentalists, who were still reeling from the fight to save the ozone layer. For McKibben the crises were connected and spoke to a bigger problem: a disregard for nature and how humans are capable of harming it.
His book is a lament that nature has lost its independence. Even if everything could be done to stave off warming, McKibben writes, it would have to come from human ingenuity and depend on our intervention into natural processes. This is another sign that we have encroached too far — that nature itself is over, as he puts it. His only solution, one we certainly have not heeded in the decades since, is “to go no farther down the path we’ve been following.”
THE HARD TRUTH:
“The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert (nonfiction).
Reporting from the Andes, the Amazon rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef and her own backyard, Kolbert registers the impact of climate change on the life of our planet. What emerges is a picture of the sixth mass extinction, which threatens to eliminate 20% to 50% of all species on Earth within this century.
All the warnings are here, in Kolbert’s elegant, accessible prose: sea levels rising, deforestation, the dispersion of disease-carrying species. But she also digs deep, offering an intellectual history of “extinction” and placing in context the catastrophes ahead by grappling with how life on Earth ended and was regenerated in the distant past.
“By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.”
WHO SAW IT COMING?: “The Drowned World,” J.G. Ballard (fiction).
With its vision of a London swamped by the rising Thames River and a warming planet leading to an urban landscape of lush tropical foliage, Ballard’s dystopian fantasy — written in
1962 — laid the groundwork for generations of climatechange fiction.
The book imagines the dawning of a geologic age like the one environmentalists now call the Anthropocene, with resulting changes to a broad swath of plant and animal species, including humans.
The plot involves a looter who refuses to leave London even as the water grows hotter, and an expedition of scientists trying to determine whether civilization might someday take root again.
HOW PEOPLE ACT WHEN IT GETS BAD: “The Wall,” John Lanchester
(fiction). Lanchester’s novel (2019) elegantly and chillingly imagines how current political attitudes might play out as the repercussions of climate change grow more severe. With sea levels rising and extreme weather events increasingly common, an island nation that closely resembles Britain has built a concrete wall around its entire perimeter to hold back both the water and the desperate tide of refugees from harder-hit areas. The narrator, Joseph Kavanagh, has embarked on his mandatory two-year service as a “Defender,” guarding a section of the wall against outsiders even as he falls in love and contemplates what the future will bring. That includes the threat of invasion, as a government official tells the Defenders at a pivotal moment: “The shelter blew away, the waters rose to the higher ground, the ground baked, the crops died, the ledge crumbled, the well dried up. The safety was an illusion. … The Others are coming.”
DID WE LEARN FROM KATRINA?: “Salvage the Bones,”
Jesmyn Ward (fiction).
Set in the days leading up to and immediately after Hurricane Katrina, this National Book Awardwinning novel follows a black family in Mississippi as it prepares for, and recovers from, disaster. Esch, a pregnant teenager, is at the center of the story. A fierce, mythology-loving young woman, she’s quick to connect the events of her own life with those of the Greeks.
For all the devastation at its core, this is an insistently hopeful book. As our reviewer put it: “It wants to teach you how to wait out the storm and swim to safety.”
COAST DWELLERS: “The Water Will Come,” Jeff Goodell
(nonfiction). “Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity,” Goodell writes in his book (2017). “It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.” This book takes us there, to a place where we can picture Miami completely underwater.
Goodell, who has written other books about climate change, here travels to cities like Lagos, Rotterdam and Venice — that are at risk of vanishing if the rise in water follows current projections.
Maybe the most interesting element he explores is people’s inability to see the rising tide. Talking to an influential developer in Miami, Goodell asks if he’s worried about the future when the ocean takes over. He isn’t, he says. “Besides,” the developer adds, “by that time, I’ll be dead, so what does it matter?”
WHAT WILL
INSPIRE FUTURE ACTIVISTS?
“Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg’s Call to Save the Planet,” Jeanette Winter
(for kids). With charming artwork and straightforward language, this picture book (ages 3 to 8) uses the life story of the young climate activist Greta Thunberg to help kids understand climate change — and to give them a sense of what they can do about it. By following Thunberg’s story — who at 15 decided she wouldn’t be complacent about the crises she kept hearing about — readers can see how powerful individuals can be when they decide to act. Though it’s aimed at informing and motivating, the book, like Thunberg, is also about urgency. Her dramatic words guide the tone: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic … I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”