Most of us know that anthropogenic climate change is melting the ice caps, increasing sea levels, exacerbating the strength and damaging power of the largest hurricanes and cyclones, and damaging coral reefs. This is just the beginning. There are many current and projected impacts on human health and food security, and all manner of ecological changes-mostly for the worse. But there is also hope in the rapid development of the latest inexpensive solar panel technology and battery storage capacity that will obviate the need to burn fossil fuels, the source of all this climatological mayhem. Most of us don't get to read the latest scientific papers on the subject though; to see them requires subscriptions to expensive scientific journals or a university library card. This book comprises easily readable summaries of over 150 of such papers published in 2016 and 2017, well before the results appear in most popular books. The 19 authors searched the current literature and cover a broad swath of the most interesting climate-related research from the past year-and-a-half. It remains to be seen whether the US public will follow the conservative agenda rejecting this science and concluding that the proper way forward is to equate "America First" with the resumption of the wholesale use of coal and oil along with a reduction of the energy-efficiency and pollution-prevention measures that industry now knows how to produce in a cost effective way. Let's hope not.
About the Author: Dr. Emil Morhardt is Roberts Professor of Environmental Biology in the W. M. Keck Science Department of Claremont McKenna, Scripps, and Pitzer Colleges, members of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. He has been writing and teaching about energy, other natural resources, and climate change at the Colleges for nearly two decades. During the two decades prior to that he was a Senior Vice President and Director of Western Operations of a large environmental consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area whose clients included electric and gas utilities, petroleum companies, major water suppliers, the Electric Power Research Institute, the National Park Service, the USEPA, and several branches of the US military. He began work in this field shortly after the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law, participated in developing the implementation guidelines for several federal agencies, and was one of the authors of California's first joint federal and state NEPA/CEQA report.