Earth Intruders

What happens if we do nothing about climate change? Dr. Heidi Cullen, one of the world's foremost climatologists and environmental journalists helps us to see this phenomena not just from the big picture, but from the very weather happening in your backyard. It's happening - from California where the drought will strip away water supply, to Greenland where the warm temperatures will expose the minerals beneath the permafrost. If climate change doesn't abate, then things are about to change drastically for all regions on earth, each country facing a different crisis. And guess what? The melting ice caps are just the beginning.

There has been five extinction episodes in the last half billion years, and author Elizabeth Kolbert says the sixth is about to arrive soon. With research from scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines from botany to marine biology, this book gives a moving account of the evolution of extinction as well as the startling number of species that have gone and are going extinct over time. The thought of a sixth extinction looming is frightening, but this man-made crisis might just be inevitable if we keep up with our actions.

Is capitalism what will kill the earth? Fawzi Ibrahim says it's no surprise that the tipping point of capitalism coincides with an environmental crisis of the same dimensions. Consumerism and capitalism have led us to ravage the earth for resources in order to satisfy our demands and wants. And if there's one thing we're sure of, is that the earth is simply not safe in capitalist hands.

The alternative to coal and crude oil is clean energy like wind, solar and nuclear. But nuclear power is still something no every one is on board with - because of the risks that should happen it there were a fallout. Mark Lynas details how the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s succeeded only in making the world more dependent on fossil fuels, and how the future should stray away from that same mistake. Is clean energy possible in the future? Only time can tell.

Award-winning novelist Ian McEwan writes yet another solid novel - this time a satirist piece about a jaded Nobel-winning physicist whose dysfunctional personal life and cynical ambition see him pursuing a solar-energy based solution for climate change. And instead of a doom-and-gloom situation about the end of the earth, Solar is a comical, light novel that highlights how humankind has to eventually, finally, hope that better technology and an improved humanity can get us off the hook.

Sometimes Earth is not a hospitable place - think of the hurricanes, storms, earthquakes, floods and typhoons that strike

There's no other way to describe this book other than "powerful". Call it an expose of sorts, but this non-fiction book tells of the controversial story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Can this be considered a crime of sorts? Climate change and global warming is not just an "environmental" issue - it's one that involves the bigwigs running the world. Former vice-president Al Gore says "Anyone concerned about the state of democracy in America should read this book.”

State of Fear was published in 2004, but it still prevails as one of Critchton's best work. The techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton in which eco-terrorists plot mass murder to publicize the danger of global warming. Fair enough that the science in the novel might be sketchy and distorted, but that's what /fiction/ is right?

When it comes to environmental issues, there can be a lot of conflicting reports, numbers and stances. But acclaimed writer Elizabeth Kolbert cuts through the competing rhetoric and political agendas to elucidate for Americans what is really going on with the global environment and asks what, if anything, can be done to save our planet. She travels around the world - to Alaska, Greenland, the Netherlands - where climate change is affecting the environment in significant ways. Rising sea levels, thawing permafrost and changes in migratory patterns. Are these isolated incidents, or do they paint a bigger picture?

We already know the terrible stuff that befalls in the process of climate change. But what Hell and High Water does is bring us through a fascinating journey through early texts that speak to climate change – including the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato’s myth of Atlantis, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth - reveals the psychohistory of modern consumerism. He shows how we have fallen prey to a numbing culture of violence and the motivational manipulation of marketing. And to start to resolve what has become of the human condition, we must get more real in facing up to despair and death.

Which species of moth was nearly killed off by the fight for cleaner air? How does a cow's bottom contribute to global warming? Could global warming mean... a colder climate? You get all the answers to the questions that most experts gloss over when it comes to this global phenomena. The historical angle looks into our troubled relationship with the earth, as well as helps us understand that what we're seeing now is not just recent, but that that has been happening for decades, if not centuries.

Half a millennium ago, a great global warming happened. The New York Times called book this a "fascinating account of shifting climatic conditions and their consequences", and the Financial Times say this was a "thought-provoking read, which marshals a remarkable range of learning.” In this book, Brian Fagan reveals how subtle changes in the environment had far-reaching effects on human life, in a narrative that sweeps from the Arctic ice cap to the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. Could this understanding into the past help us build a better future, perhaps?

If you were to condense the history of the earth in a year, then humans would have only occupied the last hour of the last day of the earth. That's how short our time on earth is. And despite our short time on Earth, we've by far been the most sophisticated yet most destructive species. The book is a refreshing take on climate change in that it tackles aspects of human impacts other than climate change. It also paves a practical, realistic way to save the earth without resorting to despair and fearmongering.

With so many fast food choices and options, we start to forget where your food come from? And from where the food comes from - what happens to the world around it? Michael Pollan tracks the journey of our food from farm to plate, and at the same time you get to see how this journey impacts the environment, how our food industry is unsustainable in the long run.

3 transformations are underway right now: Climate change is real and is pushing us toward managing the planet as a whole. Urbanization--half the world's population now lives in cities, and eighty percent will by midcentury--is altering humanity's land impact and wealth. And biotechnology is becoming the world's dominant engineering tool. Stewart Brand shatters a number of myths and presents counterintuitive observations on why cities are actually greener than countryside, how nuclear power is the future of energy, and why genetic engineering is the key to crop and land management.