Hacker News Books

What part?

For an overview of the evidence I don't know, but if you want a book with a list of practical strategies Drawdown is a good place to look

Drawdown is one of the most comprehensive and well-sourced books about solving anthropocentric climate change. If this article alarms you, in their technical report they lay out how switching to a plant-based diet is one of the most effective ways you can decrease your ecologial footprint: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/plant-rich-diets

I asked the question because I was actually wondering your thoughts, like, maybe I'm being too negative to think what has been done so far has been far from what's necessary. I wasn't trying to be cynical about it.

In terms of suggestions, the book Drawdown contains many. It lists 100 contributing solutions to climate change. I'm going to go read it again, but the gist is that there are no silver bullets.

Two things that were campaign and earlier year promises we've yet to see.. planting 3 billion trees, and ending fossil fuel subsidies.. those still haven't happened.

I have similar perspective and it is very depressing to see the world marching towards destruction of the modern civilization.

I was speaking about this to a friend and he recommended to read book called Drawdown to lift me out of despair. The book is published in the library and all of it is available at https://drawdown.org/. It was great to see that the work to fix or at least slow things down is already underway. But of course by no means guaranteed to succeed. Especially since that collection of essays did kind of dance around the biggest challenge of industrial rapacious capitalism really being incompatible with caretaking of the entire planet in a fair and balanced way.

On that note, somehow right after reading The Drawdown I stumbled on (I think via HN maybe?) Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future) which I swear takes a lot of the stuff from The Drawdown and lays out a path to turning things around that includes a lot of people saying no to the current way of doing things and finally caring for the environment. It was interesting to see the pleas of Mary to the bankers who the book makes a great case are actually the rulers of the world with the quotes of USA's central bankers from just a couple of days where they explicitly state that climate is not within their purview.

I don't know. I got children and I get really depressed about shit they will have to deal with. My parents were similarly depressed when they were my age now, and I was my children age now, and nothing got done.

Wishing us all lots and lots of luck.

I've been reading "Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming" edited by Paul Hawken

https://www.drawdown.org/the-book

My impression so far is that offshore wind, onshore wind, and solar are promising solutions for doing the bulk of the heavy lifting for energy production. Of course it isn't an all or nothing, but scaling up nuclear isn't 'vital'.

There isn't really such a thing as "unbiased" in climate unless you're an outright AGQ denier. There are a lot of different models, and the model you choose will give you different results. People have different foci- some people, like David Wallace Wells in the Uninhabitable Earth look at and warn about the most dangerous model. Others, like the IPCC, try to look at them broadly.

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know by Joseph Romm is a great read. Very basic.

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken is a good follow up for understanding what is necessary and what can be done.

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen explains how historically Carbon has controlled the Earth's climate system.

That's my best list for "unbiased".

You could pick a solution area you feel attracted to from the Drawdown book (http://www.drawdown.org) and see how you can contribute. The Drawdown team has spent several years computing and ranking the impact of over 100 solution areas that can combine to reduce CO2 while also providing other benefits (so called no-regret solutions)

You may find that high impact solutions are in areas you may not be thinking about but that energize you, like the fact that educating girls beats out rooftop solar power (which is also a very high ranking solution).