David Wallace-Wells is a New York magazine columnist and deputy editor. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review and a national fellow at the New America Foundation.

It is even worse than you imagine. If your concern about global warming is dominated by concerns about sea-level rise, you are only touching the surface of the terrors that could occur—food shortages, refugee crises, climatic wars, and economic catastrophe.

Among the best books on climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism, and the trajectory of human progress. It has been called a "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation's Silent Spring" (The Washington Post).

The Uninhabitable Earth is also a powerful cry to action. Because, just as the world was brought to the verge of disaster in the course of a lifetime, the responsibility for averting it now rests with a single generation— today's.

Author: David Wallace-Wells

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525576711

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 3148 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #10,320 in Books

#7 in Environmental Policy

#10 in Human Geography (Books)

#15 in Natural History (Books)

Paul Hawken is an activist and author. He has established successful, environmentally responsible firms and advised heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy. He is the author of seven books, four of which were national bestsellers: The Next Economy, Growing a Business, The Ecology of Commerce, and Blessed Unrest.

Based on rigorous analysis by prominent scientists and politicians from around the world, here are the 100 most substantial ways to reverse global warming.

In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of academics, professionals, and scientists has banded together to propose a set of practical and bold climate change solutions. One hundred strategies and practices are detailed in Drawdown, some of which are well-known and some of which you may have never heard of. They range from renewable energy to girls' education in low-income nations to land use strategies that remove carbon from the atmosphere. The solutions exist, they are economically viable, and communities all over the world are putting them into action with skill and dedication. They suggest a viable road ahead if implemented on a worldwide scale over the next thirty years, not simply to halt global warming but also to attain drawdown, the point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to drop. These policies promise a cascade of advantages to human health, security, wealth, and well-being, giving us every reason to view the current global crisis as a chance to create a more just and habitable world.

Author: Paul Hawken

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143130447

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 1506 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #11,056 in Books

#9 in Environmental Policy

#14 in Environmental Economics (Books)

#19 in Climatology

Shalanda Baker is a law professor at Northeastern University. Professor Baker spent three years as an associate professor of law at the University of Hawai'i's William S. Richardson School of Law, where she was the founding director of the Energy Justice Program. She previously taught law at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She received a Fulbright award in 2016 and spent a year in Mexico researching energy reform, climate change, and indigenous rights.

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017, destroying the small island's energy grid. The nearly year-long power outage that ensued exemplifies how the new climatic reality connects with race and energy access. The island is home to brown and black US residents who lack the political clout of their continental counterparts. As the world continues to warm and hurricanes like Maria become more prevalent, we must reimagine our current energy system to enable reliable, locally produced, and locally regulated energy without reproducing current power and control infrastructure.

Shalanda Baker's Revolutionary Power equips people made most vulnerable by our current energy system with the tools they need to reinvent the system in the service of humanity. She contends that people of color, the poor, and indigenous people must participate in the development of a new energy system in order to disrupt the current system's unequal power dynamics.

Revolutionary Power is an energy transformation playbook that includes a step-by-step review of the key energy policy sectors that are ripe for action. Baker tells the experiences of individuals who have been left behind by our existing society as well as those who are fighting to build a more just one. She hopes to inspire activists working to construct our new energy system by drawing on her experience as an energy-justice champion, a lawyer, and a queer woman of color.

Climate change will push us to reconsider how we generate, distribute, and govern energy. But how far are we willing to go to alter the system? This historical juncture offers an exceptional chance for a broader change of the energy system, and consequently an opportunity to reform society. Revolutionary Power demonstrates how.

Author: Shalanda Baker

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Power-Activists-Energy-Transition/dp/1642830674

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 36 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #123,736 in Books

#29 in Energy Policy (Books)

#79 in Atmospheric Sciences (Books)

#135 in Energy Production & Extraction

Catherine Coleman Flowers is the former founder and director of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise, and she has been the rural development manager of the Equal Justice Initiative's Race and Poverty Initiative since 2008. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama, and is the author of Waste: Uncovering the Dirty Truth About Sewage and Inequality in Rural America (The New Press).

Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur "genius," grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, dubbed "Bloody Lowndes" for its violent and racist history. Once the core of the voting rights movement, it is now the starting point for a new movement that is also Flowers' life's work: the campaign to secure human dignity through a right that most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, particularly the rural poor, lack an affordable way of properly disposing of waste from their toilets and, as a result, live in filth. Flowers refers to this as America's shameful secret. She tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West, in this "powerful and moving book" (Booklist).

In Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not just those of poor minorities—in this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative.

Author: Catherine Coleman Flowers

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Womans-Against-Americas-Secret/dp/1620976080/

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 191 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #286,607 in Books

#37 in Environmental & Natural Resources Law (Books)

#216 in Development & Growth Economics (Books)

#274 in Environmental Policy

Nathaniel Rich is the author of the books King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor's Tongue, as well as the novel Losing Earth. He is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books, as well as a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. He currently resides in New Orleans. Second Nature, Rich's second novel, will be released in March 2021.

We understood almost everything we know today about climate change by 1979, including how to avert it. Over the next decade, a small group of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, put their careers on the line in a desperate, increasing battle to persuade the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their and our tale.

Nathaniel Rich's remarkable history of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon—the subject of news coverage, editorials, and dialogues all across the world—was given its own issue in the New York Times Magazine. It brought to life the moral dimensions of our shared suffering by focusing on the lives of people dealing with the great existential threat of our time.

Among the best books on climate change, Losing Earth explores the human tale of climate change in even fuller, more intimate language. It provides previously revealed details about the origins of climate denialism as well as the origins of the fossil fuel industry's systematic attempt to impede climate policy through misinformation, propaganda, and political influence. The story is carried forward into the present day, struggling with the long shadow of our previous failures and addressing critical issues about how we make meaning of our history, future, and ourselves.

Losing Earth, like John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, is a rare achievement: a captivating work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we arrived here and how we must go.

Author: Nathaniel Rich

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07HF21NRN/

Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars (from 244 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #157,653 in Kindle Store

#47 in Environmental Science (Kindle Store)

#160 in Environmental Issues

#186 in Science History & Philosophy

Elizabeth Kolbert is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction. She has received two National Magazine Awards and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Blake-Dodd Prize for her work at The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer.

The prophecy that man will have dominion "over all the land, and over every crawling thing that creepeth upon the earth" has become a reality. Human impacts on the world are so ubiquitous that we are believed to be living in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

Elizabeth Kolbert examines the new world we are building in Under a White Sky. Along the way, she meets biologists working to save the world's rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave desert; engineers in Iceland turning carbon emissions to stone; Australian researchers working to develop a "super coral" that can survive in a hotter world; and physicists considering shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.

Kolbert describes human civilisation as a ten-thousand-year effort in defying nature. She investigated how our potential for destruction has changed the natural world in The Sixth Extinction. She now investigates how the very actions that have endangered our world are increasingly considered as the only option for its salvation. Under a White Sky is a completely unique analysis of the challenges we confront, at times inspiring, horrifying, and darkly funny.

Author: Elizabeth Kolbert

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593136276

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 1430 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #67,903 in Books

#76 in Human Geography (Books)

#116 in Climatology

#201 in Environmentalism

Todd Miller has spent the last fifteen years researching, writing about, and working on immigration and border issues from both sides of the US-Mexico border for organizations such as BorderLinks, Witness for Peace, and NACLA. He spent the majority of his time in Tucson, Arizona, and Oaxaca, Mexico, with brief stops in New York City thrown in for good measure. He has spent the most of his life near to the United States' international line, both south and north, between Tucson and the Buffalo/Niagara Falls region of New York state, where he grew up. He is the author of Border Patrol Nation (City Lights, 2014), and his border essays have featured in publications such as the New York Times, TomDispatch, Mother Jones, The Nation, Al Jazeera English, and Salon.

Climate change is now the top national security concern to the United States, surpassing terrorism, according to US military planners. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a person is four times more likely to be compelled to relocate due to environmental disaster than owing to conflict, and environmental disasters displaced 19.2 million people globally in 2015. Droughts, fires, and floods are causing an increasing number of people to cross national borders, and the problem isn't simply the massive number of people on the move, but also the legions of heavily militarized border forces deploying to stop them.

Todd Miller travels to hot areas in the United States and around the world in fast-paced language to uncover how the environmental crisis is spawning millions of climate refugees who are testing the developed world's boundaries and resources. Miller investigates how a perception of fear in the United States is fuelling calls for high-tech monitoring fortresses and an ever-expanding border wall. He also weaves in stories of people defying the army, border patrols, and police who are mobilized to fight those in need. In Storming the Wall, Miller passionately argues that the greatest way to accomplish sustainability and security is through ecological restoration rather than border militarization.

Author: Todd Miller

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B06VY1R3FL/

Ratings: 4.8 out of 5 stars (from 68 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #892,333 in Kindle Store

#89 in Public Policy Immigration

#271 in Immigration Policy

#280 in Human Geography (Kindle Store)

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D., is a marine biologist, policy specialist, writer, and native Brooklynite. She is one of the co-founders of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, the climate campaign The All We Can Save Project, and the podcast How to Save a Planet. She was included to the Time 100 Next list in 2021.

Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson is an author, strategist, teacher, and native Atlantan who was named one of Time's fifteen "Women Who Will Save the World." Her work has appeared in The Drawdown Review and the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and she is the author of the novel Between God & Green.

The climate movement is experiencing a renaissance, with leadership that is more characteristically feminine and feminist, anchored in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it is evident that women and girls are critical voices and agents of change for this planet, they are all too frequently left out of the conversation. It's more than a bias issue; it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. We need everyone to alter everything.

All We Can Save, one of the best books on climate change, illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leaders on climate in the United States—scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers across generations, geographies, and race—with the goal of advancing a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women provide a range of thoughts and insights about how we might fast and dramatically transform society.

All We Can Save, which combines essays, poetry, and art, is both a salve and a guide for understanding and accepting what has been done to the globe, while also strengthening our commitment to never give up on one another or our collective destiny. To move away from the abyss and toward life-giving possibility, we must summon truth, bravery, and answers. The book, curated by two climate leaders, is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward saving all that we can.

Author: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/All-We-Can-Save-Solutions/dp/0593237064

Ratings: 4.8 out of 5 stars (from 713 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #68,582 in Books

#117 in Climatology

#119 in Environmental Economics (Books)

#236 in Environmental Science (Books)

McKenzie Funk is a Windfall author and award-winning magazine journalist. His work has featured in Harper's Bazaar, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Outside, and the New York Times, among other publications.

Sean Runnette's narrations have garnered him two Audie nominations and five Earphones Awards. In addition, he has directed and produced over 200 audiobooks, including several Audie Award winners. He has performed with The American Repertory Theater and Mabou Mines on tour, and his film and television roles include Two if by Sea, Copland, Sex and the City, Law & Order, and Third Watch.

McKenzie Funk has spent the last six years around the world reporting on how we are preparing for a warmer world. Funk demonstrates that the easiest way to comprehend the disaster of global warming is to look at it through the eyes of those who perceive it most clearly—as a business opportunity.

The physical effects of global warming can be divided into three categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk goes to over a dozen countries to interview entrepreneurs who see opportunity in each of these drivers.

The thaw is a windfall for newly arable, mineral-rich Arctic territories like Greenland, as well as the Israelis, who are the surprising monarchs of the fabricated snow trade. Desalination, which is critical to Israel's survival, can yield a snow-like byproduct that alpine countries employ to extend their ski season.

Drought generates chances for private firefighters who work for insurance firms in California, as well as investment managers who support South Sudanese warlords who dominate local agriculture. There is no more valuable asset than food as droughts spike global food prices.

The deluge—rising oceans, surging rivers, and superstorms that will threaten island nations and coastal cities—has been our most distant concern, but it is no longer so distant after Hurricane Sandy and failure after failure to reduce global carbon emissions. The race is on for Dutch architects constructing floating cities and American scientists patenting hurricane defenses. The impending flood poses an existential threat to low-lying countries like Bangladesh.

Funk travels to the front lines of the melt, drought, and deluge to provide a personal narrative of the thriving business of global warming. We are choosing to adapt to a hotter planet by allowing climate change to continue unabated. The subsequent boom will be huge business; few will prosper, but much of the world will suffer. In Windfall, McKenzie Funk has examined both sides, and his findings will astound us all. It is regarded as one of the best books on climate change.

Author: Mckenzie Funk

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DMCV4A8/

Ratings: 4.4 out of 5 stars (from 111 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #898,297 in Kindle Store

#130 in Oil & Energy Industry (Kindle Store)

#149 in Green Business (Kindle Store)

#186 in Environmental Economics (Kindle Store)

Naomi Klein is an award-winning writer, columnist, and best-selling author of The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything, and No Is Not Enough. Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She is a Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, a Rolling Stone reporter, and a contributor to both The Nation and The Guardian. She is a cofounder of The Leap, a climate justice initiative.

For more than two decades, Naomi Klein has been the leading chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and the earth, as well as an unashamed supporter of a broad environmental agenda centered on justice. She produces booming, important pieces for a wide public in straightforward, exquisite dispatches from the frontlines of contemporary natural disaster: clairvoyant advises and terrifying warnings of what future awaits us if we do not act, as well as hopeful views of a far better future. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green Fresh Deal brings together for the first time more than a decade of her fervent writing, together with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of our current political and economic choices.

Klein is at her most prophetic and philosophical in these long-form articles, addressing the climate issue not only as a deep political challenge but also as a spiritual and imaginative one. This is a rousing call to action for a planet on the verge, delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of "perpetual now," to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of "climate barbarism."

Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis, with reports ranging from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented "ecological conversion."

On Fire depicts the blazing urgency of the climate issue, as well as the flaming intensity of a rising political movement seeking a catalytic Green New Deal, in an expansive, far-reaching inquiry that views the fight for a greener future as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives.

Author: Naomi Klein

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Burning-Case-Green-Deal/dp/1982129913

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 590 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #231,067 in Books

#220 in Environmental Policy

#309 in Economic Policy

#313 in Economic Policy & Development (Books)