The Climate Book
A pretty coffee table book.
That is what I though when I got my hands on the The Climate Book created by Greta Thunberg. An ascetically pleasing book, whose magnetic cover makes you to grab it and flip through its pages. Thanks to the colour’s used, the graphs and figures and the dramatic photographs covering two full pages, it catches the eye.
Beyond the appearances, Greta´s name moves masses, fans and haters alike. As the activist and influencer that she is she had to write a book to raise awareness and inspire action, which she did, together with over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders. Greta opens up every one of the five parts in which the book is divided, as well as, every main chapter. After that, the key message in every subsection is powerfully delivered by the other authors.
I particularly enjoyed the second part, realizing how our planet is changing for the worst, reading one by one about heat, methane, air pollution and aerosols, clouds, the jet streams, droughts and floods, the ice sheets, the oceans, forests, insects, soil and the permafrost.
With such a generic top-down approach with short, curated contributions I awaited to find sections related to agriculture, the food systems and transportation as they are more connected to public consciousness, but I didn’t expect to come across heavy industry specifics, and yet there are a couple of information pieces that address the industrial emissions. If you read my blog, you may find Mapping Emissions in an Industrial World by John Barrett and Alice Garvey and The Technical Hitch by Ketan Joshi interesting.
In these piece, replacing fossil fuels with low-carbon fuels, adopting low-carbon technologies, increasing production processes efficiency and creating a circular economy are named as solutions to decarbonize industry. In the second piece, a more specific analysis about Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) state of the art is made. Overall message, though, comes back to the imperative reduction in demand side.
I don’t have this book on my coffee table, it sits in my library, and from time to time I flip the pages and re-read one of the chapters or a graph or a figure.
When reading this book for the first time, I sometimes agreed, sometimes disagreed with the author of the piece I was reading. I could see the connection with the global warming problem most of the times, and certainly it made me think.
This book might make you reflect as well.
