Results by title

Updated throughout, the definitive guide for students, practitioners, and anyone interested in where climate science, politics, and policy stand today.

The physics and chemistry that drive human-caused climate change are surprisingly clear-cut. How we think about, talk about, and respond to the situation is dizzyingly complex. Meteorologist and journalist Robert Henson has spent years making climate science approachable and engaging. His internationally recognized book, The Thinking Person’s Guide to Climate Change, provides both specialists and newcomers with the background, insights, and confidence to engage with the paramount environmental issues of our lives (and beyond).

Drawing on a wealth of studies and assessments, this comprehensive yet lively guide brings a fresh eye to topics often buried in rhetoric. Introductory sections bring to life more than a century of painstaking research that tells us what we know and don’t know about human effects on climate. Henson discusses how and where fossil fuel use has been linked to heat waves, melting ice, wildfires, and other extremes. The guide also explores the high-stakes debates that swirl around climate change—including efforts to deny, downplay, or distract from the crisis—and how political, diplomatic, and legal systems are grappling with it. Color illustrations help explain everything from how the greenhouse effect traps heat to which everyday activities emit the most carbon. Special-feature boxes take readers to locations across the globe: small Pacific islands confronting sea level rise, Africa and its major rainfall shifts, California and year-round wildfire threats, and Florida with hurricanes intensifying ever more rapidly.

Thoroughly updated, this third edition has new coverage of the survivability of extreme heat, the use of global temperature thresholds, the challenge of carbon pricing, and other timely topics. It spotlights the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report as well as evolving geopolitics. This book acknowledges controversy, underscores points of agreement, and favors action over apathy and doomism.

Arguing that resilient coasts emerge from collaborative, cross-disciplinary understanding rather than single-issue solutions

At the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, climate change impacts are visible to the attentive observer. High tides increasingly flood the causeway across the Sprague River Salt Marsh, large winter storms are reshaping the sand dunes at Seawall Beach, and the offshore waters of the Gulf of Maine are among the fastest-warming on the planet. Environmental change is not new there, nor is the impact of human activity, but different parts of this coastal system are changing at different rates, in different ways. Some components are potentially self-renewing, such as the barrier dune beach, while others, such as Piping Plover populations or the salt marshes, might be restored only with assistance. Unfortunately, other components may already be beyond help: the forest of pitch pines between the dunes and the marsh faces the dual threat of saltwater intrusion below ground and potential burial by migrating sands above.

In The View from Morse Mountain, contributors invite readers into this system through an array of complementary inquiries into bedrock geology, carbon capture by salt marshes, dune movement, the physiology of trees, bird migration, perceptual psychology, and the overlays of Indigenous history and colonial settlement. Fostering adaptability, particularly in coastal systems, requires just such an integrated set of examinations and perspectives. This collection of expert analyses works to encourage place-based curiosity in anyone, both those familiar with this area of Maine and people beyond, helping them recognize both loss and resilience, and to deepen their love for the places they treasure.

Contributors include the volume editors as well as Emily Chandler, Caitlin Cleaver, Isobel Curtis, J. Dykstra Eusden Jr., Brett Huggett, Bev Johnson, Dana Oster, Mike Retelle, and Robert Strong.