The best books to make sense of the climate crisis and the pressing need for transformative action

I met Clive Hamilton at an event in London in 2011 shortly after the book’s launch. At the time the climate science community was still reeling from the disaster of the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit.

As rationalists, we were asking the question: “Why is the scientific evidence not being listened to?” Hamilton provided answers – about humanity’s free market consumerist fetish, the insidious role of mainstream economics, and our denialist tendencies, alienation from nature, and hubris.

He explained that “Awakening to the prospect of climate disruption compels us to abandon most of the comfortable beliefs that have sustained our sense of the world as a stable and civilising place.”

Dismissing techno-solutions such as Carbon Capture and Storage and ‘Clean Coal’ as diversionary tactics by powerful interests, the book offers an ethical and moral basis for reconstructing the future. Rereading it 13 years after its publication, I am impressed by its substance and depressed by its continuing relevance.

The most common question I am asked when giving lectures on climate change is “What can I do?”

Mike Berners-Lee’s mission is to answer that question in as comprehensive, comprehensible, and helpful way possible. He provides a handbook of justifications and authoritative insights into addressing “how we can make the transition into a new mode of living that works for us and fits our new context (of climate and environmental change) – a way of operating that won’t smash the place up and will allow us to thrive despite our power.”

The antidote to climate dismay is action, and this book points the way.

Christiana Figueres was the UN Executive Secretary for Climate Change in the run-up to, and during, COP21. She is founding partner of Global, a member of the B Team, and Convenor of Mission 2020.

Her co-author, Tom Rivett-Carnac was a senior political strategist influencing the COP21 proceedings. Between them they provide a view from the highest level of the international political machinery addressing climate change.

Following a comparison of two possible futures – one dystopian and one utopian – the book offers a dose of ‘stubborn optimism’ moderated by recognition of the limits of ‘endless abundance’ and a call for ‘radical regeneration’.  It continues with ten actions to which we can all contribute, and ends with a passionate call to arms.

It aims to be practical, optimistic, and empowering. Of the many popular books on the topic, its pedigree and carefully crafted content cause it to stand above the crowd.

Simon Sharpe has a knack for original thinking. His book is a tour de force in three parts.

Having explained on page 1 that to keep the climate “just about safe and stable” requires a reduction in global greenhouse emissions per unit of GDP at a rate five times faster than we have managed for the past two decades (hence the title) – he proceeds to examine the performance and practices of the climate science community, the mainstream economists, and the diplomats.

In each case, with ruthless clarity, he finds them wanting. The science community has overdosed on predictions when risk assessment and addressing “What is the worst that could happen?” would have been more helpful. The flawed assumptions and norms of neoliberal economics have generated results and advice which are “worse than useless”.

And the world of diplomacy has focussed on unilateral national action, when encouraging small groups of countries to work together could accelerate change – “through faster innovation, larger economies of scale and measures to protect new entrants against incumbents”.

A key insight is the existence of social tipping points, which once triggered can allow the seemingly impossible to be achieved. Time is not on our side, and Simon’s book offers the means for influential actors to open up the accelerator.

What if we get it wrong? What if the scale and pace of our collective measures to address climate destabilisation and the biodiversity crisis remain insufficient?

Oreskes and Conway provide the imagined view of a historian of the “Second People's Republic of China” from 2393. His account describes how the political and economic elites of the early decades of the twenty-first century ignored or dismissed the clear warnings of climate catastrophe.

Soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, drought, and mass migrations resulted in “The Great Collapse of 2093”. Three centuries later as the world emerges from the “Penumbral Age’ it is a more subdued and thoughtful place. 

By dramatizing an all-too-plausible ‘ghastly’ outcome, the authors seek to galvanise the energies of readers to rise from their armchairs and act. We should all strive to ensure that the book remains firmly on the shelves of fiction.