Green Group discussion

What are the most important books on climate change? Both fiction and non-fiction.

I am currently reading The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

I have been looking at these lists, but very few people are voting on them, so they may not be reliable:
Best Climate Change Books
Consequences of Climate Change
Best Environmental Books

I am more a less interested in all aspects: What is going to happen? What can be done? what is life going to be like on 10, 20, … 50 years?

What book was the most important for you? If you could force a politician to read one, and only one book, which one would it be?

Great questions, BlueFlower. We will get to work on that. I need some time to review a bit. The two names that come immediately to my mind are Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein.

I recommend

by Naomi Klein

by Naomi Oreskes

by Jared Diamond

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Those are some of the required books to read.

I read all of them. All excellent.

by Alan Weisman

Six Degrees

by Mark Lynas

Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change

by Orrin H. Pilkey

Glaciers: The Politics of Ice

by Jorge Daniel Taillant

Thank you very much!

Would you read both The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming and Six Degrees? It sounds a bit to me like Six Degrees is almost an older version of Uninhabitale Earth.

J_BlueFlower wrote: "Thank you very much!

Would you read both The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming and Six Degrees? It sounds a bit to me like Six Degrees is almost an older versio..."

Depends how scared you want to be.

I've read Six Degrees and that's plenty scary.

Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge

by Edward Struzik

Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West

by Gary Ferguson

This is a blast from the past... but I remember what an impact this nonfiction book, written by two of my favorite SF writers (who are also scientists), had on me back in the 90's. Sadly, it's as relevant today as it was almost 30 years ago.

Thank you for all the references. Here are what I have found/read/intend to read myself:

Non-fiction::
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Book-length treatment of the ideas explored in the original 2017-essay “The Uninhabitable Earth“ of what might happen in the near-future due to global warming. (currently reading)

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History: Seems like a must-read for understanding the greater perspetive. (not read yet).

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable Why is climate change so hard to understand and why is there no climate fiction (cli-fi)?

Fiction:
The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd. Not very well written, but seems to me to be the best bet on “near future cli-fi” (reading)

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by Naomi Oreskes "The year is 2393..." (not read yet)

Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Many people label it as climate fiction. Not really in the current climate crisis way, but more of an environmental awareness book. (It is hard to be more specific without possible spoilers). (Read)

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard. Does not deal with CO2 at all, but yet has some though provoking ideas. (Read)

I wouldn't miss out on this one because it tells how the powers that be have crushed reason:

by

Clare wrote: "Depends how scared you want to be.

I've read Six Degrees and that's plenty scary"

I finished The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Here is a quote about 2/3 into the book:

"If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader. Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it. But you are not merely considering it; you are about to embark on living it."

The first 12 chapters are 12 different consequences of warming, where sea level rise is just a single one. There is a lot of different consequences and references I never heard about. Like for instance a new study of rice growing in CO2 rich environment that shows that the protein and vitamin contents goes down. That is actually quite surprising since CO2 enrichment of the greenhouse air is used to increase the yield. But the thing is that the protein content per gram goes down. If rice is the main protein source you cannot compensate for that by just eating more.

I can highly recommend the book specially since it is completely new and up to date (Published February 19th 2019).

If anyone read both The Uninhabitable Earth and Six Degrees, I would like to know is Six Degrees is worth reading also given that The Uninhabitable Earth covers the same material and Six Degrees is 12 years old.