Climate Change: The Facts


Alan Moran - 2015
    Climate Change: The Facts features the world’s leading experts and commentators on climate change. Highlights of Climate Change: The Facts include: Ian Plimer draws on the geological record to dismiss the possibility that human emissions of carbon dioxide will lead to catastrophic consequences for the planet. Patrick Michaels demonstrates the growing chasm between the predictions of the IPCC and the real world temperature results. Richard Lindzen shows the climate is less sensitive to increases in greenhouse gases than previously thought and argues that a warmer world would have a similar weather variability to today. Willie Soon discusses the often unremarked role of the sun in climate variability. Robert Carter explains why the natural variability of the climate is far greater than any human component. John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy demonstrate how little success climate models have in predicting important information such as rainfall. Nigel Lawson warns of the dire economic consequences of abandoning the use of fossil fuels. Alan Moran compares the considerable costs of taking action compared to the relatively minor potential benefits of doing so. James Delingpole looks at the academic qualifications of the leading proponents of catastrophic climate change and finds many lack the credentials of so-called ‘sceptics’. Garth Paltridge says science itself will be damaged by the failure of climate forecasts to eventuate. Jo Nova chronicles the extraordinary sums of public money awarded to climate change activists, in contrast to those who question their alarmist warnings. Kesten Green and Scott Armstrong compare climate change alarmism to previous scares raised over the past 200 years. Rupert Darwall explains why an international, legally binding climate agreement has extremely minimal chances of success. Ross McKitrick reviews the ‘hockey stick’ controversy and what it reveals about the state of climate science. Donna Laframboise explains how activists have taken charge of the IPCC. Mark Steyn recounts the embarrassing ‘Ship of Fools’ expedition to Antarctica. Christopher Essex argues the climate system is far more complex than it has been presented and there is much that we still don’t know. Bernie Lewin examines how climate change science came to be politicised. Stewart Franks lists all the unexpected developments in climate science that were not foreseen. Anthony Watts highlights the failure of the world to warm over the past 18 years, contrary to the predictions of the IPCC. Andrew Bolt reviews the litany of failed forecasts by climate change activists.

Warnings: The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather


Mike Smith - 2010
    Science and politics collide in this thrilling account of America's struggle for protection against the deadly threat of violent weather. Warnings tells the dramatic true stories of the unsung weather warriors who save innocent lives, often by risking their own.

Voyage of the Beagle


Charles Darwin - 1839
    It was to last five years and transform him from an amiable and somewhat aimless young man into a scientific celebrity. Even more vitally, it was to set in motion the intellectual currents that culminated in the arrival of The Origin of Species in Victorian drawing-rooms in 1859. His journal, reprinted here in a shortened version, is vivid and immediate, showing us a naturalist making patient observations, above all in geology. As well as a profusion of natural history detail, it records many other things that caught Darwin’s eye, from civil war in Argentina to the new colonial settlements of Australia. The editors have provided an excellent introduction and notes for this Penguin Classics edition, which also contains maps and appendices, including an essay on scientific geology and the Bible by Robert FitzRoy, Darwin’s friend and captain of the Beagle.

Chased by the Light: A 90-Day Journey-Revisited After the Storm


Jim Brandenburg - 1998
    This exquisite book, now in softcover, is the result of that bold and immensely personal project. Through the accompanying essay, Brandenburg shares his innermost thoughts and passions as he witnesses the cycle of nature near his home in the northwoods of Minnesota.Brandenburg also contributes new photos and an Epilog that illustrates and discusses the devastating summer wind storm that wreaked havoc on the locations photographed for the original project.

50 Things To See With A Small Telescope


John A. Read - 2013
    People of all ages frequently ask, “How did you find that so quickly?” Well, this book will explain just that! The planets in our solar system, the International Space Station, sunspots, birds, nebula, airplanes, and comets are just some of the items that his book will help you find!If you have been having difficulties enjoying your small telescope, this book is for you. There is something interesting about pretty much everything in outer space and it is exciting how many pop-culture references are derived from things in the night sky! Viewing the stars referenced in Star Trek, or talking about a character in Harry Potter named after a constellation, is just another way to make stargazing that much more fun! I am very excited to share my knowledge of astronomy and I am sure you will enjoy this book for years to come. By working through the 50 items in this book you will achieve a well-rounded understanding of amateur astronomy.

Environment: The Science Behind the Stories


Jay Withgott - 2010
    Integrated central case studies woven throughout each chapter, use real-life stories to give you a tangible and engaging framework around which to learn and understand the science behind environmental issues. Printed on FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified paper, the newly revised Fourth Edition engages you through the addition of new EnvisionIt photo essays.

Texas Organic Vegetable Gardening: The Total Guide to Growing Vegetables, Fruits, Herbs, and Other Edible Plants the Natural Way


J. Howard Garrett - 1998
    It describes more than 100 food plants and gives specific information on the growth habits, culture, harvest, and storage of each.

Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River


David Owen - 2017
    David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado's headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border where the river runs dry. Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more interesting than the headlines let on.The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our future: how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert, and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails.

The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth


Ben Rawlence - 2022
    Ben Rawlence's The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming planet from Norway to Siberia, Alaska to Greenland, to meet the scientists, residents and trees confronting huge geological changes. Only the hardest species survive at these latitudes including the ice-loving Dahurian larch of Siberia, the antiseptic Spruce that purifies our atmosphere, the Downy birch conquering Scandinavia, the healing Balsam poplar that Native Americans use as a cure-all and the noble Scots Pine that lives longer when surrounded by its family.It is a journey of wonder and awe at the incredible creativity and resilience of these species and the mysterious workings of the forest upon which we rely for the air we breathe. Blending reportage with the latest science, The Treeline is a story of what might soon be the last forest left and what that means for the future of all life on earth.

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization


Roy Scranton - 2015
    While I don't share his conclusions about the potential for social movements to drive ambitious mitigation, this is a wise and important challenge from an elegant writer and original thinker. A critical intervention."--Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the ClimateComing home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought--the shock and awe of global warming.Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter. From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself . . . and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in--the Anthropocene--demands a radical new vision of human life.In this bracing response to climate change, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with death.Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that’s true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age—or this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.A war veteran, journalist, author, and Princeton PhD candidate, Roy Scranton has published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media.More praise for Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:"Perhaps it is because he is a soldier, perhaps it is because he is a literate human being, but the fact is--Roy Scranton gets it. He knows in his bones that this civilization is over. He knows it is high time to start again the human dance of making some other way to live. In his distinctive and original way he works though a common cultural inheritance, making it something fresh and new for these all too interesting times. This compressed, essential text offers both uncomfortable truths and unexpected joy."--McKenzie Wark, author of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore


Elizabeth Rush - 2018
    In Rising, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish in place.Weaving firsthand testimonials from those facing this choice--a Staten Islander who lost her father during Sandy, the remaining holdouts of a Native American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles, a neighborhood in Pensacola settled by escaped slaves hundreds of years ago--with profiles of wildlife biologists, activists, and other members of these vulnerable communities, Rising privileges the voices of those too often kept at the margins.

The Joyful Environmentalist


Isabel Losada - 2020
    And to do this wholeheartedly, energetically and joyfully.’ Finally! A book about saving our planet that is fast, funny and inspiring too. Isabel doesn’t bother with an examination of the problem but gets right on with the solutions. Her aim: to look for every single way that we can take care of the planet; how we live and work, travel, shop, eat, drink, dress, vote, play, volunteer, bank – everything. The feel-good book of the year for anyone who loves nature and knows that one person can make a HUGE difference. ‘This is the joy we need in our lives.’ - George Monbiot ‘She gave my spirit a lift and my feet somewhere to stand.’ - Sir Mark Rylance ‘Practical and realistic as well as visionary.’ - Dr Rowan Williams ‘A manifesto of brilliant advice offered with humility and good grace. A practical guide to empower us all.’ - Isabella Tree ISABEL LOSADA is the bestselling author of six previous books including The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment.

Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Mysterious Fish


James Prosek - 2010
    Prosek travels the globe to tell the story of the eel--from New York to New Zealand; from Europe to Japan and the small island of Pohnpei in Micronesia, where freshwater eels are worshipped by members of the eel clan.

Arctic Dreams


Barry Lopez - 1986
    Only a few species of wild animals can survive its harsh climate. In this modern classic, Barry Lopez explores the many-faceted wonders of the Far North: its strangely stunted forest, its mesmerizing aurora borealis, its frozen seas. Musk oxen, polar bears, narwhal, and other exotic beasts of the region come alive through Lopez’s passionate and nuanced observations. And, as he examines the history and culture of the indigenous people, along with parallel narratives of intrepid, often underprepared and subsequently doomed polar explorers, Lopez drives to the heart of why the austere and formidable Arctic is also a constant source of breathtaking beauty, beguilement, and wonder.Written in prose as memorably pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is a timeless mediation on the ability of the landscape to shape our dreams and to haunt our imaginations.

Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope


Tim Flannery - 2010
    We have formed a global civilisation of unprecedented might, driven forward by the power of our minds—a civilisation which is transforming our Earth. We are masters of technology, and of comprehension, but it's what we believe that may, from now on, determine our fate.Tim Flannery's first major book since The Weather Makers charts the history of life on our planet. Here on Earth, which draws its points of departure from Darwin and Wallace, Lovelock and Dawkins, is an extraordinary exploration of evolution and sustainability. Our success as a species has had disastrous effects on many of the Earth's ecosystems and could lead to our downfall. But equally, Flannery argues, we are now equipped as never before to explore our true relationship with the planet on which our biological, economic and cultural futures depend. Here on Earth is not just a dazzling account of life on our planet. It will change the way you live.