Climate crisis for idiots?

Let's write a climate book

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I'll try to write the climate science book I wish had been around when I needed it a few years ago. A kind of climate change for dummies book. It must be a proper science book; but pop science; and even a reference book! Suitable for, say, bright school kids, undergraduate students, and the educated reader. We'll try to give full explanations for everything, which even school students will be able to read and understand. I'd like to do something as good as 'Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air' [2], but for the climate.

I will review and precis important, recent climate science papers. The last 14 years saw a massive increase in funding for climate science after Barack Obama came to power in the USA in 2008. Funding for physical climate sciences shot up to about $4 billion per year.[1]

Many of the papers I'll read (for us) may have got no funding at all; but they would also not have been written had the climate change bandwagon not hit the stratosphere after 2008. Because the band-wagon itself attracted a host of curious scientists fascinated, and a little horrified, at this mass cultural 'climate crisis' we agonize over in the West. I'll be tweeting my explanations, and inviting replies here.

I believe enough has now been published on the climate for us to arrive at comprehensive explanations for earth's climate. I'll concentrate on the last twelve thousand years: called the Holocene. When I've finished I may be able to gather it all into a book. It will be a scientific book, in the sense that all the evidence will be referenced, and there'll be no mudslinging. I personally find it hard to read a book with mudslinging in. I want to keep my writing easy for readers to understand.

References

I'll try to give an online citation to the full article, so that the whole book can be understood, and its citations verified:

1. Many papers are open access today, so the the full text is available on the Internet to read for free,
2. Some paywalled papers are put online by their authors, (such papers are not called open access but the author has somehow made them open access)
3. Once in a blue moon, I may not be able to find a link to an open access full article online. We'll figure out a way to make those papers available to read for free.

The reader will be able to find every paper, just as a school kid, or undergrad on a budget needs to.

Today, every 'academic article' published is given a digital object identifier, DOI, code. This code is designed to find the article online. In theory, every article can be found by going to doi.org. For example to find an article with the DOI code = 10.1016/j.erss.2019.101349 search the Internet for doi.org then add a forward slash / followed by the DOI to get online URL. For example: doi.org / 10.1016/j.erss.2019.101349. Notice how the URL you end up at isn't the one you typed in! You were redirected at doi.org to the proper URL.

Books will be referenced by the ISBN. As a rule, we won't cite books unless they are free to read too! Science books base their text on published papers so we will tend to explain a section of a book.

[1] I Overland and B K Sovacool, 2020, Energy Research & Social Science 62 (2020) 101349 [OA] 10.1016/j.erss.2019.101349

[2] David J. C. MacKay, 2009, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. 978-0-9544529-3-3

Glossary

• 'Cause célèbre' - French phrase common in English - an important issue of the day. Like Black Lives Matter, for example.
• Holocene - The most recent interglacial period, beginning about 11,650 years ago.
• Ice Age - a climate period during which both earth's poles (North & South) are frozen over.
• Interglacial - a climate period, often during the current Ice Age when glaciation is at a minimum
• Glaciation, AKA: Glacial period - a climate period, often during the current Ice Age when glaciation changes to a maximum. Glaciers grow, the poles ice over more, and the ice sheets cover ever more of the arctic and antarctic poles, moving North (in the southern hemisphere, and South in the Northern hemisphere. For example, finally covering the top 40 degrees of latitude (above 50N) on land.
• latitude - a geographic circle that specifies the north–south position of a point on the Earth's surface. When combined with longitude it gives a precise location. The Equator has a latitude of 0°, the North Pole has a latitude of 90° North (written 90° N, 90N, or +90°), and the South Pole has a latitude of 90° South (written 90° S, 90S or −90°)