Further Reading
Interested in learning more about climate change and policy?
There are many books, studies, reports, and articles about climate change and related issues. This page offers recommendations for resources that delve into climate change broadly and readings specific to each of the three conference panel focus areas. While this list is far from comprehensive, it should be a good starting point to explore these topics in greater depth.
"The Age of Sustainable Development" by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is one of the world's most perceptive and original analysts of global development. In this major new work he presents a compelling and practical framework for how global citizens can use a holistic way forward to address the seemingly intractable worldwide problems of persistent extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and political-economic injustice: sustainable development. Read more >
"Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity" by Mike Hulme
Climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity's place on Earth. Drawing upon twenty-five years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme provides a unique insider's account of the emergence of this phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it is understood. He uses different standpoints from science, economics, faith, psychology, communication, sociology, politics and development to explain why we disagree about climate change. Read more >
"How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts" by Candis Callison
During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility. Read more >
"Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change" by Elizabeth Kolbert
New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tackles the controversial subject of global warming... In writing that is both clear and unbiased, Kolbert approaches this monumental problem from every angle. She travels to the Arctic, interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science and the studies, draws frightening parallels to lost ancient civilizations, unpacks the politics, and presents the personal tales of those who are being affected most-the people who make their homes near the poles and, in an eerie foreshadowing, are watching their worlds disappear. Growing out of a groundbreaking three-part series for the New Yorker, Field Notes from a Catastrophe brings the environment into the consciousness of the American people and asks what, if anything, can be done, and how we can save our planet. Read more >
"Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Merchants of Doubt tells the 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. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly - some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole... Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era. Read more >
University of California “Bending the Curve" Report
A new report by the University of California (UC) outlines 10 scalable solutions for slowing climate change. Delivered as part of the UC summit on Carbon and Climate Neutrality, the Bending the Curve report aims to flatten the trajectory of human-caused warming by reducing CO2 by 80 percent by 2050 and moving to carbon neutrality post-2050. Read more >
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report Fifth Assessment Report"
The Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report provides an overview of the state of knowledge concerning the science of climate change, emphasizing new results since the publication of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Read more >
"Nature" Climate Change January 2016 Edition
Read Nature's special climate change edition with an editorial, research highlights, commentaries, and more. Read more >
"Changing Planet, Changing Health" by Paul R. Epstein and Dan Ferber
Climate change is now doing far more harm than marooning polar bears on melting chunks of ice—it is damaging the health of people around the world. Brilliantly connecting stories of real people with cutting-edge scientific and medical information, Changing Planet, Changing Health brings us to places like Mozambique, Honduras, and the United States for an eye-opening on-the-ground investigation of how climate change is altering patterns of disease. Written by a physician and world expert on climate and health and an award-winning science journalist, the book reveals the surprising links between global warming and cholera, malaria, lyme disease, asthma, and other health threats. Read more >
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Chapter 11: Human Health
This section of the IPCC’s latest report covers the human health implications of climate change. Read more >
World Health Organization "Quantitative risk assessment of the effects of climate change on selected causes of death, 2030s and 2050s"
The World Health Organization provides a quantitative assessment of the health impacts of climate change. This constitutes an update and a further development of the assessment that was first published by WHO for the year 2000, now with a wider range of health impacts, and projections for future years. Read more >
"Health risks, present and future, from global climate change" by Tony McMichael, Hugh Montgomery, and Anthony Costello in the British Medical Journal
Tony McMichael and colleagues outline the risks climate change presents to health directly and indirectly, now and in the future. Read more >
"Climate change: present and future risks to health, and necessary responses" by A. J. McMichael and E. Lindgren in the Journal of International Medicine
Recent observed changes in Earth’s climate, to which humans have contributed substantially, are affecting various health outcomes. These include altered distributions of some infectious disease vectors (ticks at high latitudes, malaria mosquitoes at high altitudes), and an uptrend in extreme weather events and associated deaths, injuries and other health outcomes. Future climate change, if unchecked, will have increasing, mostly adverse, health impacts – both direct and indirect. Climate change will amplify health problems in vulnerable regions, influence infectious disease emergence, affect food yields and nutrition, increase risks of climate-related disasters and impair mental health. The health sector should assist society understand the risks to health and the needed responses. Read more >
"How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate" by Jeff Goodell
A look into the world of geoengineering and the group of taboo-breaking scientists at its forefront who believe, in the face of global warming, that the time has come for human beings to take control of the earth's climate. Read more >
"A Case for Climate Engineering" by David Keith
Climate engineering—which could slow the pace of global warming by injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere—has emerged in recent years as an extremely controversial technology. And for good reason: it carries unknown risks and it may undermine commitments to conserving energy. Some critics also view it as an immoral human breach of the natural world. The latter objection, David Keith argues in A Scientist’s Case for Climate Engineering, is groundless; we have been using technology to alter our environment for years. But he agrees that there are large issues at stake. Read more >
"Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth" by U.S. National Academy of Sciences
As one of a two-book report, this volume of Climate Intervention discusses albedo modification - changing the fraction of incoming solar radiation that reaches the surface. This approach would deliberately modify the energy budget of Earth to produce a cooling designed to compensate for some of the effects of warming associated with greenhouse gas increases. The prospect of large-scale albedo modification raises political and governance issues at national and global levels, as well as ethical concerns. Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth discusses some of the social, political, and legal issues surrounding these proposed techniques. Read more >
"The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World" by Oliver Morton
The Planet Remade explores the history, politics, and cutting-edge science of geoengineering. Oliver Morton weighs both the promise and perils of these controversial strategies and puts them in the broadest possible context. The past century’s changes to the planet—to the clouds and the soils, to the winds and the seas, to the great cycles of nitrogen and carbon—have been far more profound than most of us realize. Appreciating those changes clarifies not just the scale of what needs to be done about global warming, but also our relationship to nature. Read more >
"A Case Against Climate Engineering" by Alan Robock
Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor of Climate Science at Rutgers University, makes a case against climate engineering. Read more >
"Geoengineering the climate: An overview and update" by J. G. Shepherd in Philosophical Transaction of The Royal Society
There are two main classes of geoengineering: direct carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management that aims to cool the planet by reflecting more sunlight back to space. The findings of the review of geoengineering carried out by the UK Royal Society in 2009 are summarized, including the climate effects, costs, risks and research and governance needs for various approaches. The possible role of geoengineering in a portfolio of responses to climate change is discussed, and various recent initiatives to establish good governance of research activity are reviewed. Read more >
"The Politics of Climate Change" by Anthony Giddens
If climate change goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a back-of-the-mind issue. We recognize its importance and even its urgency, but for the most part it is swamped by more immediate concerns. Political action and intervention on local, national and international levels are going to have a decisive effect on whether or not we can limit global warming as well as how we adapt to that already occurring. However, at the moment, argues Anthony Giddens, we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics-as-usual won't allow us to deal with the problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source. Giddens introduces a range of new concepts and proposals to fill in the gap, and examines in depth the connections between climate change and energy security. Read more >
"Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence" by Christian Parenti
From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Read more >
"Power in a Warming World: The New Global Politics of Climate Change and the Remaking of Environmental Inequality (Earth System Governance)" by David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts, and Mizan R. Khan
Combining rich empirical description with a political economic view of power relations, David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts, and Mizan Khan document the struggles of states and social groups most vulnerable to a changing climate and describe the emergence of new political coalitions that take climate politics beyond a simple North-South divide. They offer six future scenarios in which power relations continue to shift as the world warms. A focus on incremental market-based reform, they argue, has proven insufficient for challenging the enduring power of fossil fuel interests, and will continue to be inadequate without a bolder, more inclusive and aggressive response. Read more >
"Climate change, human security and violent conflict" by Jon Barnett and W. Neil Adger in Political Geography
Climate change is increasingly been called a ‘security’ problem, and there has been speculation that climate change may increase the risk of violent conflict. This paper integrates three disparate but well-founded bodies of research – on the vulnerability of local places and social groups to climate change, on livelihoods and violent conflict, and the role of the state in development and peacemaking, to offer new insights into the relationships between climate change, human security, and violent conflict. Read more >
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Chapter 12: Human security
This section of the IPCC’s latest report covers the human security implications of climate change. Read more >
Geopolitics of Climate Change: The Arctic Case
Steven L. Lamy, Vice Dean for Academic Programs and Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, prepared this reading for the Geopolitics of Climate Change panel at this conference. Read more >
Climate Change Readings
Panel 1: Emerging Diseases, Public Health, and Climate Change
Panel 2: Geoengineering and Climate Change
Panel 3: The Geopolitics of Climate Change
