Overheated

How Climate Change Will Cause Floods, Famine, War, and Disease

By: Andrew T. Guzman

Narrated by: Fleet Cooper

Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order. In Overheated, Guzman takes climate change out of the realm of scientific abstraction to explore its real-world consequences. He writes not as a scientist, but as an authority on international law and economics. He takes as his starting point a fairly optimistic outcome in the range predicted by scientists: a 2 degree Celsius increase in average global temperatures. Even this modest rise would lead to catastrophic environmental and social problems. Already we can see how it will work: The ten warmest years since 1880 have all occurred since 1998, and one estimate of the annual global death toll caused by climate change is now 300,000. That number might rise to 500,000 by 2030. He shows in vivid detail how climate change is already playing out in the real world. Rising seas will swamp island nations like Maldives; coastal food-producing regions in Bangladesh will be flooded; and millions will be forced to migrate into cities or possibly "climate-refugee camps." Even as seas rise, melting glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas will deprive millions upon millions of people of fresh water, threatening major cities and further straining food production. Prolonged droughts in the Sahel region of Africa have already helped produce mass violence in Darfur. Clear, cogent, and compelling, Overheated shifts the discussion on climate change toward its devastating impact on human societies. Two degrees Celsius seems such a minor change. Yet it will change everything.Download the accompanying reference guide.©2013 Andrew T. Guzman (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

A must read!

Very well done. Puts the large facts and figures of climate change in relatable perspective. Well read as well, and very easy to listen to.

Best Climate Change Book

Other books tell the science of climate change, or the politics. This says what will really happen.

Terrific and important book

This is an incredibly important book that is well written and timely. It lays out very clearly why we need to act aggressively to battle climate change, which will affect all of us in the years ahead.

Reality

Important information without question. However for me personally, the bad news is overwhelming. Perhaps I'll come back again someday.