Climate Future

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?

The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster.

What begins as a small fish kill at a wastewater plant in South Carolina sets off a chain reaction that reveals a terrifying truth: the infrastructure we trust—the pipes beneath our feet, the plants that keep our water clean—may already be compromised. Retired wastewater engineer Campbell Lake thought he’d left the industry behind for good. But when a former facility he once warned about goes dark, and strange biological signals begin appearing in treatment systems across the country, he’s pulled into a mystery that stretches far beyond regulatory failure. Alongside a brilliant but ...

The Lost Continent: At the edge of the world, an impossible relic from the fables of antiquity has risen from the frozen wastelands of Antarctica. Professor Logan and his exploration team rush to investigate this historic find, but this unique discovery puts their lives in peril when they unearth the remnants of a long-forgotten civilization left buried beneath the ice. Within the twisting labyrinths below the melting glaciers, they uncover an ancient culture which had perished from a mysterious cataclysm. They soon realize it was a polar shift which had caused their destruction, and our ...

Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data and poetry, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take—from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer—to create.

The human brain is not as it seems. The systems that it relies for everyday tasks—such as sensory processing and the maintenance of consciousness—have “failure modes” that mislead us about the nature of our mind and the world around us. In the face of a climate crisis, these failure modes have inhibited us from acting with the resolve this moment calls for. Drawing on cutting-edge research, Our Shared Illusions: What Neuroscience Reveals About Our Minds, Our Planet, and Our Future uses this new science of the brain to understand these failure modes, and chart a way forward. Our ...

Winner American Energy Society - Energy Futurist Book 2023! Substantially updated for 2023 to reflect the impact of the energy crisis, Covid-19 and the emergence of hydrogen technology. The ‘Future of Energy’ is written to be accessible to anyone interested in learning more about energy. The book takes the reader through a future for energy generation, transportation, and utilisation. Concise and comprehensive, bringing together discussion on energy and thoughts on the range of topics which form the fulcrum of the challenges ahead of us. Topics include sustainability, hydrogen, nuclear,...

After decades of missed opportunities, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today's industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion. What is the world going to look like when all these changes have run their course? Author John Michael Greer seeks to answer this question, and with some degree of accuracy, since civilizations tend to collapse in remarkably similar ways.

In the absence of motorized boats and gondolas, Venice’s waters have returned to a sparkling blue color. Deer have been spotted roaming cities in Italy, and mountain goats recently took over a small seaside town in Wales. Taking advantage of the decreased boat traffic, whales have returned to roaming Vancouver’s harbours. The absence of “regular” human activities has dramatically affected our environment. In this book, Bob McDonald turns his focus to global energy sources, and shows how the global shutdowns may have been exactly what we needed to show us that a greener future is achievable.

What if the future didn’t suck? Solarpunk: Designing a Future That Doesn’t Suck is a visionary and deeply grounded blueprint for surviving and thriving on a planet in crisis. Far more than wind turbines wrapped in ivy, solarpunk is a design philosophy, a political strategy, and a cultural movement that fuses ecological sanity with radical imagination. This book unpacks solarpunk from the roots up: why it rejects fossil logic, how it decentralizes power, and what it looks like when applied to energy systems, cities, gardens, digital networks, architecture, food, governance, and more. ...

With research and insight, Charles Eisenstein details how the quantification of the natural world leads to a lack of integration and our “fight” mentality. With an entire chapter unpacking the climate change denier’s point of view, he advocates for expanding our exclusive focus on carbon emissions to see the broader picture beyond our short-sighted and incomplete approach. This refocusing away from impending catastrophe and our inevitable doom cultivates meaningful emotional and psychological connections and provides real, actionable steps to caring for the Earth.

This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back.

Will Silo 1 uncover the secret of Silo 42 or face annihilation? In a world ravaged by war and destruction, 50 Silos have been built underground to protect the last remaining humans. But each Silo is unaware of the existence of the others, believing they are the only survivors on Earth. As inhabitants wait for the outside conditions to improve, Silo 42 has secretly thrived using a variety of innovative solutions within a society that incorporates Native American values with respect for life, creativity, and freedom. But Silo 42's prosperity may be short-lived. Silo 1 Head, Donald Keene, is ...

In The Conceivable Future, authors Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli explore the ways in which the climate crisis is affecting our personal decisions about family planning, parenting, and political action. This book offers fresh, timely answers to questions such as: How do I decide to have a baby when there's the threat of environmental collapse? How do I parent a child in the middle of the climate crisis? What can I actually do to help stop global warming?

From the Booker prize–winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known. 2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis...

In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth’s last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenland’s ice begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the 20th century. Their original goal was to conquer Greenland’s seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drilling - one mile, two miles down.Their aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earth’s past.

We have never had so much information at our fingertips, and yet most of us simply don't understand how our world really works. Professor Vaclav Smil is not a pessimist or an optimist, he is a scientist, and this book is a much-needed reality check on topics ranging from food production and nutrition, through energy and the environment, to globalisation and the future. For example, the carbon footprint of meat is well known, but did you know that the equivalent of five tablespoons of diesel fuel goes into the production of each greenhouse-grown, medium-size, supermarket-bought tomato?

That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The question we now face is: Can we change nature, this time in order to save it? Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, takes a hard look at the new world we are creating.

Renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He’s survived polar storms, traveled in temperatures that can freeze flesh in seconds, and worked hundreds of miles from the nearest humans, all to deepen our understanding of our world. Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Ends of the Earth blends travel writing, science, and history in a book brimming with surprising and wonderful discoveries.