{"id":32284,"date":"2025-07-23T22:44:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T22:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/32284\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T22:44:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T22:44:08","slug":"three-books-to-understand-our-ravaged-climate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/32284\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Books to Understand Our Ravaged Climate"},"content":{"rendered":"

The summer of 2025 has been a season of climate-driven catastrophes: wildfires in Turkey, flooding in China and the U.S., and fatally high heat across Europe. This series of events points to the increasing ferocity of extreme weather\u2014the storms, droughts, floods, fires, and heat waves that, as global warming accelerates, have become more severe and more unpredictable. (Today, scientists speak not only of storms but also \u201cmega rains,\u201d not only of dry spells but also \u201cflash droughts.\u201d) This week, the New Yorker writers Elizabeth Kolbert<\/a>, Bill McKibben<\/a>, and Rivka Galchen<\/a> recommend three books, each one focussed on a different aspect of our rapidly changing climate.<\/p>\n

The Heat Will Kill You First<\/p>\n

by Jeff Goodell<\/p>\n

Goodell\u2019s book was first published in July, 2023. This turned out to be the hottest month on record until July, 2024, which was warmer still. July, 2025, has, of course, also been a scorcher\u2014since it\u2019s not yet over, its rank is unclear\u2014and in recent weeks I\u2019ve often thought about Goodell\u2019s deeply informative book. It covers a lot of ground, exploring topics such as the effects of extreme heat on the human body, the impacts of marine heat waves on ocean life, and the invention of air-conditioning (which was first used to prevent printing paper from warping). Extreme heat is already \u201cremaking our planet,\u201d Goodell observes, and, he warns, things are only going to get hotter: \u201cEven if we transition fairly quickly to clean energy, half of the world\u2019s human population will be exposed to life-threatening combinations of heat and humidity by 2100.\u201d \u2014Elizabeth Kolbert<\/p>\n

Storms of My Grandchildren<\/p>\n

by James Hansen<\/p>\n

The climatologist James Hansen<\/a> is the Paul Revere of climate change, having warned the world in congressional testimony delivered in June, 1988, that fossil-fuel emissions were warming the planet. (He also survived several Presidential attempts to fire him from his job leading the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a collaboration between Columbia University and NASA, before retiring, only to see DOGE shut down its office on the Upper West Side this spring.) He has always had a visceral feel for how the planet responds to forces that change its energy balance, including, most notably, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that results from burning fossil fuel. Part of that feel is based not on present-day research but on paleoclimatology, and, in \u201cStorms of My Grandchildren,\u201d Hansen uses past performance to predict future returns. In the book, which was published fifteen years ago, Hansen writes that \u201conce ice sheet disintegration begins in earnest, our grandchildren will live the rest of their lives in a chaotic transition period\u201d\u2014and the intervening years have not been kind to the frozen poles. \u2014Bill McKibben<\/p>\n

Running Out<\/p>\n

by Lucas Bessire<\/p>\n

Bessire\u2019s transfixing book about the Ogallala Aquifer, the expanses of which flow below the Great Plains\u2019 fields of silky corn and golden wheat, is a reminder that extreme weather aboveground has a less visible sequel underground. After the drought years of the Dust Bowl, the government began subsidizing irrigation projects, and many more acres of the Midwest were turned into farmland, leading to an increasing amount of water being drawn from the aquifer. This was a reasonable solution, even one to celebrate, when the rate of water taken from the aquifer did not exceed the rate of its replenishment. But in many parts of the Plains today, that balance is not held; the aquifer, which would take six thousand years to refill, is projected to be more than two-thirds empty within the next fifty years. An anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma, Bessire comes from a family that has been farming and ranching in Kansas for five generations, and his book combines geographic, personal, historical, and political inquiry to show how stories of surface water and stories of groundwater can be thought of as chapters of the same epic\u2014in which responses to one environmental derangement, often abetted by humans, bring about another. A singular and wondrous book, \u201cRunning Out\u201d is at once knowledgeable and tender, searching and uncertain. \u2014Rivka Galchen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The summer of 2025 has been a season of climate-driven catastrophes: wildfires in Turkey, flooding in China and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,4253,14487,88,6733,2986],"class_list":{"0":"post-32284","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-climate-change","10":"tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-global-warming","13":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}