Books about climate change science and policy

Dire Predictions: The Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC by Michael Mann is a visually rich, detailed, but very accessible retelling of the IPCC scientific basis report. I recommend this volume (get the most current one) for use in classrooms as well as for general reading.

Climatology versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics by Dana Nuccitelli. The main thrust of Dana’s book is to put climate science deniers’ models and predictions to the test. If they are so right, and real climate scientists are so wrong, and this fight has been going on for decades, we should be able to see a divergence between what real scientists say and what fake scientists say, with the latter (the denier’s choice) being more correct. But it isn’t. Real science got climate science right, fake science did not.

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Joe Romm. Here, Romm addresses a wide range of questions people have about climate change, but with a focus on what you need to know in order to inform decisions in your actual Life. Climate change is real, and matters. You are real, and you matter too. How do these two real things that mater intersect?

Caring for Creation: The Evangelical’s Guide to Climate Change and a Healthy Environment by Paul Douglas and Mitch Hescox. I know a lot of my readers are atheists, and this book is written by a Christian fundamentalist and some sort of Bishop. Put Paul, a friend and colleague, is a true blue scientist even if his politics have not always been that blue, and he is sincerely committed to the cause of promoting good climate science and fighting the deniers. (Those of you who live in the Twin Cities already know about Paul Douglas, I’m sure.) So, while this book might not be for you, it might be for your Uncle Bob, if Uncle Bob is a fundamentalist Christian.

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming edited Paul Hawken, with a forward by Tom Steyer, gives a ranked list of things that can be done, by people, governments, institutions, and corporations, to decarbonize our economy.

Books about science denialism and related topics

The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazyf by scientist Michael Mann and cartoonist Tom Toles is a newspaper-political-cartoon style commentary, with text, putting climate change denial in proper context.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway demonstrates the links between the tobacco industry’s efforts to control their narrative and cause several generations of kids to become addicted to nicotine, and the climate denial industry, well funded by Big Oil, doing roughly the same thing but for petroleum. The links are both in form (science denial through doubt), function (gaining money and power) and often, in who participates, with many individuals doing both jobs.

The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto is the single best and most comprehensive overview and careful analysis of the war on science. Otto even covers what to do to help win this war.

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines by Michael Mann is an accounting of the denialist attack on his imprtant “hockey stick” research and parallel stories.

Web sites or organizations

NASA Global Climate Change

Get Energy Smart Now!

DeSmotBlog

Carbon Brief

World Meteorological Oragnization

Paul Douglas Weather

Twitter feeds

I started out copying the twitter handles off of the account profiles from my own internal and private Twitter list of climate tweeters. Then, I started to break out in a cold sweat, and I think it was memories of spending hours messing around with blogrolls back in the day. So I stopped, renamed the list to make more sense, and make it public. That makes so much more sense. This way, if I update the list, it is updated for you as well, if you subscribe to it.

So, check out my Climate Change Tweeters Twiiter list!

Documents

The Copenhagen Diagnosis

IPCC Reports

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
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