Readings.com.au: Green Top 10

Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and our Last Chance to Save Humanity

An urgent and provocative call to action from the world's leading climate scientist.

In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen, the world's leading scientist on climate issues, speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: the planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although Hansen was Al Gore's science advisor for An Inconvenient Truth, his recent data shows that our situation is even more dire today. But politicians haven't made the connection between the policy and the science. He shows why Gore's solution won't work, why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon is a goal we must achieve in the next two decades if our grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown.

This urgent manifesto bucks conventional wisdom (including the Kyoto Protocol) and is sure to stir controversy, but Hansen - whose climate predictions have come to pass again and again, beginning in the 1980s when he first warned Congress about global warming - is the single most credible voice on the subject worldwide, and this book is sure to receive enormous attention.

Hansen paints a devastating but all-too-realistic picture of what will happen in the next year, and ten years from now if we follow the course we're on. But he is also an optimist, showing that there is still time to do what we need to do. Urgent, strong action is needed, and this book, released just before the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009, will be key in setting the agenda going forward to create a groundswell, a tipping point, to save humanity - and our grandchildren - from a dire fate more imminent than we had supposed.

About James Hansen
Perhaps best known for bringing global warming to the world's attention in the 1980s when he first testified before Congress, Dr. James Hansen is considered the world's leading climatologist. The head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he served as Al Gore's science advisor for An Inconvenient Truth. He teaches at the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies at Columbia University, lectures at universities and other institutions throughout the world and has been interviewed in the New York Times and other publications. This is his first book.

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

Al Gore offers a visionary blueprint of the changes that we should make as a world community in order to prevent the climate crisis from threatening human civilisation.

Al Gore has been a passionate advocate of action to halt climate change for many years. In his best-selling book, *An Inconvenient Truth*, he wrote about the urgent need to address the problems of climate change, presenting comprehensive facts and information on all aspects of global warming in a direct, thoughtful and compelling way, using explanatory diagrams and dramatic photos to clarify and highlight key issues.

Adopting the same lucid technique in *Our Choice*, he proposes solutions at every level of our lives, from the personal and local to the national and political to the area of international policy and law.

Climate of Australia: The Authoritative Climate Reference

This practical guide from the Bureau of Meteorology draws together our knowledge about Australia’s climate, past and present. It examines typical and extreme weather patterns, long-term variability and the effects of climate change.

Fully illustrated throughout, the Climate of Australia contains detailed maps and tables that chart rainfall, temperature, humidity and sunshine. Colour photographs show the variety of landscapes shaped by Australia’s climate. Specific case studies of extreme weather events such as cyclones and droughts incorporate satellite and radar imagery.

An accompanying CD-ROM contains a full set of monthly climate maps, together with statistical tables from a selection of the Bureau’s observation sites.

The Real Global Warming Disaster

This original book considers one of the most extraordinary scientific and political stories of our time: how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history.

Christopher Booker interweaves the science of global warming with that of its growing political consequences, showing how just when the politicians are threatening to change our Western way of life beyond recognition, the scientific evidence behind the global warming theory is being challenged like never before.

The book exposes the myth that the global warming theory is supported by a 'consensus of the world’s top climate scientists'. It shows how the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is run by a small group of 'global warming' zealots, who have repeatedly rigged evidence to support their theory. But the politicians, pushed by the media, have so fallen for its propaganda that, short of dramatic change, our Western world now faces an unprecedented disaster.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia

James Lovelock described his previous book, The Revenge of Gaia, as "a wake-up call for humanity". Stark though it was in many respects, in The Vanishing Face of Gaia, Lovelock says that though the weather currently seems cooler and pollution lessens as the recession bites, the environmental problems we will face in the 21st century are even more terrifying than he previously realised. The Arctic and Antarctic icecaps are melting very quickly, and water shortages and natural disasters are more common occurrences than at any time in recent history. Almost all predictions of the likely rate of climate change have been based on estimates that professional observers now show are consistently below the true rate of change. As a global community we continue to be fixated by conventional 'green' ideas which we believe will help save our world. Lovelock argues that only Gaia theory, which he originated over forty years ago, can really help us understand the crisis fully. The root problem is that there are too many people and animals for the Earth to carry.And there is in fact only one possible procedure which might bring a permanent cure to climate change, but we are unlikely to adopt it.

The Revenge Of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity

For millennia, human kind has exploited the Earth. Now, as the world warms and weather patterns dramatically change, the Earth is beginning to fight back. Lovelock, one of the giants of environmental thinking, argues passionately and poetically that, although global warming is now inevitable, we are not yet too late to save at least part of human civilization.

The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change

What does climate change mean?

How will global warming affect our lives?

Is it the cause of wilder storms and more frequent droughts?

Are these events inevitable?

Tim Flannery makes this urgent issue completely accessible. He tells the fascinating story of climate change over millions of years to help us understand the predicament we face. By burning fossil fuels we are increasing the levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, causing our planet to become warmer.

Every nation is affected differently by these changes but we have one thing in common-we are now the weather makers, and the new climate we are creating threatens the future of our civilisation.

Tim Flannery shows how we can all help to combat these problems. You may be surprised at how much you can do. The Weather Makers will change your life.

Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan

This book, more than anything else, is about a mentality that pervaded Japanese society then and which can serve as a beacon for our own efforts to achieve sustainability now.

This is a book of stories, depictions of vanished ways of life told from the point of view of a contemporary observer, depictions which are based on extensive research and presented as narrative. The stories tell how people lived in Japan some two hundred years ago, during the late Edo Period, a period when traditional technology and culture were at the peak of development and realisation, just before the country opened itself to the West and joined the ranks of the industrialised nations. They tell of a people who overcame many of the identical problems that confront us today - issues of energy, water, materials, food, and population - and who forged from these formidable challenges a society that was conservation-minded, waste-free, well-housed and well-fed, and economically robust, and which has bequeathed to us admirable and enduring standards of design and beauty.

Readers will gain insight into what it is like to live in a sustainable society, not so much in terms of specific technical approaches, but in how larger concerns can guide daily decisions and how social and environmental contexts should shape our courses of action. These stories are intended to illustrate the environmentally related problems that the people in both rural and urban areas faced, the conceptual frameworks in which they viewed these problems, and how they went about finding solutions.

This book offers a remarkable look at how traditional Japanese were able to find meaning and satisfaction in a life in which the individual took 'just enough' from the world and not more. Detailed drawings of life and technology in the Edo Period accompany the text.

Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action

In this meticulously documented call-to-action, David Spratt and Philip Sutton reveal extensive scientific evidence that the global warming crisis is far worse than official reports and national governments have indicated — and that we’re almost at the point of no return.

Serious climate-change impacts are already happening, more rapidly and at lower global temperature-increases than projected. As the USA’s most eminent climate scientist, James Hansen, told 15,000 of his colleagues at a conference in December 2007, significant ‘climate tipping’ points have already been passed. These include large ice-sheet disintegration, significant sea-level rises of up to five metres this century, and devastating species loss. The Arctic will soon be free of summer sea-ice — a century ahead of projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections — and the Greenland ice sheet is in imminent danger.

The tipping point for the loss of the Arctic sea-ice was around two decades ago, when temperatures were about 0.3°C lower than at present. Climate Code Red shows that further temperature increases of 2 degrees are effectively already in the system, and even a temperature cap of 2–2.4°C, which is proposed within the United Nations framework — and is far below what most governments are prepared to aim for — would take the planet’s climate beyond the temperature range of the last million years.

David Spratt and and Philip Sutton show that the unofficial, real projected speed of climate change— with temperature increases greater than 0.3°C per decade, and the consequent rapid shifting of climatic zones — will, if maintained, likely result in most ecosystems failing to adapt, causing the extinction of many species. The oceans will become more acidic, endangering much marine life.

This means that the dangers we all face are already much greater than the headlines indicate. According to climate scientists such as James Hansen, it is no longer a case of how much more we can ‘safely’ emit, but whether we can quickly enough stop emissions and produce a deliberate cooling before the earth’s climate system reaches a runaway trajectory that is beyond any hope of human restoration.

These imperatives are incompatible with ‘politics as usual’ and ‘business as usual’. Climate Code Red argues that there is an urgent need for all of us to recognise that we face a sustainability emergency — which requires a clear break from the politics of failure-inducing compromise. Even scientifically moderate goals (such as reducing emissions by 25–40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020) now require immoderate rates of technical and social change that are only achievable by shifting formally to an emergency footing.

Spratt and Sutton believe that we now need to think the unthinkable, because the case for emergency action is not so much a radical idea as an indispensable course we must embark upon if we are to return to a safe-climate planet.