The Best and Most Current Climate Change Books [Greg Laden's Blog]

Time to make sure you are stocked up and up to date on your climate science books. First, you will need reference materials throughout the holiday season, because Uncle Bob is going to challenge you more stridently than usual. Climate change deniers have taken over the US government. You are on the run. Underground. Up against the wall. So, you need to be ready. Uncle Bob is coming for you.

Second, you may want to give a few climate change related books away for the holidays. Know any science or social studies teachers? Maybe a nice book for Uncle Bob’s wife? Ha, that would be funny. Anyway, you’ll want to do that.

There are four books I recommend as gifts for anybody, but also, for your own enjoyment.

The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy by climate scientist Michael Mann and Washington Post political cartoonist Tom Toles is one of the most current, and in many ways, the most fun, of the climate books. The authors go right after the science deniers, but not at the expense of a lot of excellent explanation of the science itself, and the overall political situation. The cartoons are great, the text is engaging.

Also richly illustrated, but in a totally different way, and by one of the same authors, is Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding Climate Change. Michael Mann shared a Nobel Prize with the IPCC and the other scientists for their work on climate change. That process involved the production of the Scientific Basis for Climate Change IPCC report, which is redone every several years, and includes all the science behind the broad consensus. Dire Predictions represents that science in a fully understandable way, and adds additional material on the other aspects of the problem: Policy. This is a basic on the shelf text you need in your home, and that your kid’s science teachers need in their classrooms.

Not a climate change book but essential, and that I’ll put right here for you to consider: The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It, Shawn Otto’s latest popular yet scholarly work on the effort to destroy science, is a must read. Climate science isn’t the only science under attack. This book covers it all.

Caring for Creation: The Evangelical’s Guide to Climate Change and a Healthy Environment by Paul Douglas and Mitch Hescox is specifically written for your Uncle Bob, is Uncle Bob is a conservative Evangelical Christian. Paul is the country’s top meteorologist-communicator who happens to be a conservative (he claims) Evangelical Christian. Paul wrote the science in this book and it is real science, no holding back. Mitch is an Evangelical Christian guy who supplies the scriptural-religious part of the story. The book, obviously, is about how if you are an Evangelical Christian you should not be a dick about climate change.

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Joe Romm is unique among climate change books. Romm looks at the actual personal impacts of climate change, in the near and longer term future, on typical Americans. Think about it for a second. Many Americans who live in the north plan to eventually retire to warmer, southerly climes. Is that a good idea, with global warming and sea level rise happening? Are you sure that shorefront (or near shorefront) property on the Gulf Coast is a good idea right about now? What about your investment portfolio, what with changes happening in the energy industry and uncertainty in other areas? This is the book that covers that.

Climatology versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics by Dana Nuccitelli attacks climate science denialism by rushing right through the battle lines into enemy territory and deconstructing their bogus tripe. This is like the Guns of Navarone, where the guys sneak pas the Nazis and boow up their stuff, but with models. Just how have those alternative ideas and predictions, made over the last several years by climate change deniers, done, compare to the mainstream science? Well, read the book and find out. But I’ll bet you can guess.