On Climate: Readings

David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. Expanding on his 7,000 word New York magazine story that went viral, David Wallace-Wells offers on the New York Times bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books) a travelogue of our near future, bringing into stark relief the climate troubles that await—food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It is worse, much worse, than you think, writes Wallace-Wells. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. Farhad Manjoo wrote in The New York Times that “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”

Gilbert M. Gaul twice won the Pulitzer Prize and has been short-listed for the Pulitzer four other times. For more than thirty-five years, he worked as an investigative journalist for the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and other newspapers. He is the author of three previous books of investigative reporting. His most recent book is The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts (Sarah Crichton Books). Consider this: Five of the most expensive hurricanes in history have made landfall since 2005. With more property than ever in harm’s way, and the planet and oceans warming dangerously, it won’t be long before we see a $250 billion hurricane. Why? Because Americans have built $3 trillion worth of property in some of the riskiest places on earth: barrier islands and coastal floodplains. And they have been encouraged to do so by what Gilbert M. Gaul reveals in The Geography of Risk to be a confounding array of federal subsidies, tax breaks, low-interest loans, grants, and government flood insurance that shift the risk of life at the beach from private investors to public taxpayers, radically distorting common notions of risk. The Geography of Risk will forever change the way you think about the coasts, from the clash between economic interests and nature, to the heated politics of regulators and developers.

Michael Klare is the author of over fifteen books, including Resource Wars and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A contributor to Current History, Foreign Affairs, and the Los Angeles Times, he is the defense correspondent for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan Books) is an eye-opening examination of climate change from the perspective of the U.S. military. Drawing on previously obscure reports and government documents, renowned security expert Michael Klare shows that the U.S. military sees the climate threat as imperiling the country on several fronts at once. Droughts and food shortages are stoking conflicts in ethnically divided nations, with “climate refugees” producing worldwide havoc. Pandemics and other humanitarian disasters will increasingly require extensive military involvement. The melting Arctic is creating new seaways to defend. And rising seas threaten American cities and military bases themselves. While others still debate the causes of global warming, the Pentagon is intensely focused on its effects. Its response makes it clear that where it counts, the immense impact of climate change is not in doubt.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of three novels and a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change―including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. In Losing Earth (MCD) Rich tells their story, and ours. The book expands on a story Rich originally wrote for the New York Times Magazine, and to which it dedicated an entire issue. Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade became an instant journalistic phenomenon. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight. Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. In a starred review, Booklist noted that Rich’s work is "[a] must-read handbook for everyone concerned about our planet's future . . . Losing Earth is eloquent, devastating, and crucial.”