How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster PDF

Author: Bill Gates

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-02-16

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0385546149

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.

Climate Travels

Climate Travels PDF

Author: Michael M. Gunter, Jr.

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-03-28

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 0231556217

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Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Many accounts of climate change depict disasters striking faraway places: melting ice caps, fearsome hurricanes, all-consuming fires. How can seeing the consequences of human impacts up close help us grasp how global warming affects us and our neighbors? This book is a travelogue that spotlights what a changing climate looks like on the local level—for wherever local happens to be. Michael M. Gunter, Jr. takes readers around the United States to bear witness to the many faces of the climate crisis. He argues that conscientious travel broadens understanding of climate change and makes its dangers concrete and immediate. Vivid vignettes explore the consequences for people and communities: sea level rise in Virginia, floods sweeping inland in Tennessee, Maine lobsters migrating away from American territorial waters, and imperiled ecosystems in national parks, from Alaskan permafrost to the Florida Keys. But Gunter finds inspiring initiatives to mitigate and adapt to these threats, including wind turbines in a tiny Texas town, green building construction in Kansas, and walkable urbanism in Portland, Oregon. These projects are already making a difference—and they underscore the importance of local action. Drawing on interviews with government officials, industry leaders, and alternative energy activists, Climate Travels emphasizes direct personal experience and the centrality of environmental justice. Showing how travel can help bring the reality of climate change home, it offers readers a hopeful message about how to take action on the local level themselves.

Climate Change and Aviation

Climate Change and Aviation PDF

Author: Stefan Gossling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-05-04

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1136569669

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'This is a timely, challenging and fascinating book on a topic of central importance to the success or otherwise of our climate change policies. It sets down a clear marker for what has to be done in the aviation sector.' Professor John Whitelegg, Stockholm Environment Institute, University of York, UK 'Climate Change and Aviation presents a clear picture of the transport sector's greatest challenge: how to reconcile aviation's immense popularity with its considerable environmental damage and its dependence on liquid hydrocarbon energy sources. This book avoids wishful thinking and takes the much harder, but more productive, path of considering difficult solutions that clash with short-term and short-sighted expectations about the unlimited growth potential for flying.' Professor Anthony Perl, Urban Studies Program, Simon Fraser University, Canada 'A convincing and timely collection that brings together an impressive range of expertise. The book integrates various perspectives into a powerful core argument - we must do something, and quickly, to tackle the impact of aviation on our environment. The authors recognise the political difficulties associated with promoting change but present constructive options for policy makers. Required reading, especially for transport ministers set on promoting the growth of air travel.' Professor Jon Shaw, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Transport, University of Plymouth, UK Trends such as the massive growth in availability of air travel and air freight are among those which have led to aviation becoming one of the fastest growing emitters of greenhouse gases. These trends have also caused a shift in expectations of how we do business, where we go on holiday, and what food and goods we can buy. For these reasons aviation is (and is set to stay) high up on global political, organizational and media agendas. This textbook is the first to attempt a comprehensive review of the topic, bringing together an international team of leading scientists. Starting with the science of the environmental issues, it moves on to cover drivers and trends of growth, socio-economics and politics, as well as mitigation options, the result being a broad yet detailed examination of the field. This is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in transport, tourism, the environment, geography and beyond, while also being a valuable resource for professionals and policymakers seeking a clear understanding of this complex yet urgently pressing issue.

Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds

Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds PDF

Author: David L. Haberman

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0253056012

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How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change? Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges. People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.

Urban Climates

Urban Climates PDF

Author: T. R. Oke

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-09-14

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 1108179363

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Urban Climates is the first full synthesis of modern scientific and applied research on urban climates. The book begins with an outline of what constitutes an urban ecosystem. It develops a comprehensive terminology for the subject using scale and surface classification as key constructs. It explains the physical principles governing the creation of distinct urban climates, such as airflow around buildings, the heat island, precipitation modification and air pollution, and it then illustrates how this knowledge can be applied to moderate the undesirable consequences of urban development and help create more sustainable and resilient cities. With urban climate science now a fully-fledged field, this timely book fulfills the need to bring together the disparate parts of climate research on cities into a coherent framework. It is an ideal resource for students and researchers in fields such as climatology, urban hydrology, air quality, environmental engineering and urban design.

Climate Change

Climate Change PDF

Author: Mike Hulme

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-27

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1000413233

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Written by a leading geographer of climate, this book offers a unique guide to students and general readers alike for making sense of this profound, far-reaching, and contested idea. It presents climate change as an idea with a past, a present, and a future. In ten carefully crafted chapters, Climate Change offers a synoptic and inter-disciplinary understanding of the idea of climate change from its varied historical and cultural origins; to its construction more recently through scientific endeavour; to the multiple ways in which political, social, and cultural movements in today’s world seek to make sense of and act upon it; to the possible futures of climate, however it may be governed and imagined. The central claim of the book is that the full breadth and power of the idea of climate change can only be grasped from a vantage point that embraces the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. This vantage point is what the book offers, written from the perspective of a geographer whose career work on climate change has drawn across the full range of academic disciplines. The book highlights the work of leading geographers in relation to climate change; examples, illustrations, and case study boxes are drawn from different cultures around the world, and questions are posed for use in class discussions. The book is written as a student text, suitable for disciplinary and inter-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate courses that embrace climate change from within social science and humanities disciplines. Science students studying climate change on inter-disciplinary programmes will also benefit from reading it, as too will the general reader looking for a fresh and distinctive account of climate change.

The Gardener's Guide to Weather and Climate

The Gardener's Guide to Weather and Climate PDF

Author: Michael Allaby

Publisher: Timber Press

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1604695544

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“We owe it to our plants to read this book. After all, while we just live with the weather, our plants have to survive it.” —The Washington Post All gardeners are at the whim of Mother Nature, and so are our plants. Whether it’s coping with extreme drought or record-breaking snow fall, gardeners—and gardens—across the country are fighting against the elements. Instead of just reacting to the weather, Michael Allaby suggests that gardeners use knowledge about how the weather works to create the best growing conditions for their plants. Allaby brings big-picture atmospheric concepts to life with a comprehensive introduction to how weather works and explanations climate change, weather systems, and microclimates. The Gardener’s Guide to Weather and Climate proves that instead of gardening at the mercy of the weather, knowledgeable gardeners can make the weather work for them