Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World - Softcover

Nicholas PhD, Kimberly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593328175 ISBN 13: 9780593328170

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

** Los Angeles Times bestseller **

It's warming. It's us. We're sure. It's bad. But we can fix it.

After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we're in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem. Nicholas explores finding purpose in a warming world, combining her scientific expertise and her lived, personal experience in a way that seems fresh and deeply urgent: Agonizing over the climate costs of visiting loved ones overseas, how to find low-carbon love on Tinder, and even exploring her complicated family legacy involving supermarket turkeys.

In her astonishing, bestselling book Under the Sky We Make, Nicholas does for climate science what Michael Pollan did more than a decade ago for the food on our plate: offering a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture. But it can be done. It requires, Dr. Nicholas argues, belief in our own agency and value, alongside a deep understanding that no one will ever hand us power--we're going to have to seize it for ourselves.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Kimberly Nicholas is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund, Sweden's highest-ranked university. Born and raised on her family's vineyard in Sonoma, California, she studied the effect of climate change on the California wine industry for her PhD in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. Since then, she has published over 50 articles on climate and sustainability in leading peer-reviewed journals, and her research has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, Buzzfeed and more. She has also been profiled in Elle and The Guardian, and gives appearances at around 50 lectures each year, such as the recent Climate Change Leadership summit.

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Chapter 1

Carbon Is Forever

Understanding the Urgency of the Task Ahead

My mother's mother's mother, Clara, fled what is now Ukraine in 1904, when she was twenty-two. She had sewn her filigreed platinum engagement ring into her jacket to avoid detection as a deserter. If the authorities caught you leaving with your husband, they knew you were escaping for good. Her immigration record from Ellis Island lists her port of departure as Bremen. She and her husband, my great-grandfather Mark, lived in a damp tenement near Coney Island before they eventually settled in Denver, where they ran a women's clothing shop and raised my grandmother Lillian and her brother.

I've seen only one photograph of Mark, wearing a fedora, and Clara, with dark wavy hair. It was taken on a suburban Denver street with my mother, a serious five-year-old, and her sister Judy, already a great beauty at nine: old-world grandparents who loved borscht, posing with their wholly American grandchildren who thought the smell of beets and cabbage cooking was just awful. Clara made her life in a new country in her twenties, as I did in my thirties when I crossed the ocean to live in Sweden.

I never met Clara, but she touches my daily life in two ways. First, her diamond sparkles on my left ring finger. Second, carbon from the coal that powered her escape, across first a continent and then an ocean, is still warming the atmosphere I share today with nearly 8 billion people. Because when your individual actions are powered by fossil fuels, some of the carbon from those actions stays in the air for thousands of years. Your story doesn't end with your death; its contrails unfurl in the physical world for millennia.

Clara lived to be eighty-two-a good, long life. Her grandchildren-my mother and her two siblings-are the last generation of my family to have known her. They're now grandparents themselves. Once they're gone, living memory of Clara will wane and eventually the stories they shared of her will disappear too. Clara's life, as real and as vivid and important as mine or anyone else's, will fade into the background of the human tapestry. But her carbon will outlast us all.

I don't know the name of Clara's mother's mother's mother. She would have been born in black-soil country sometime around 1800, so I can guess that she was part of a big family, all of whom worked hard on the farm. I like to imagine them playing music around the fire at night. But here's one thing I know for sure: A portion of the carbon sent skyward from the wood they burned to stay warm-and the carbon they released plowing the rich black soil-is still in our air today, and it will be for at least the next three hundred generations.

I don't know what Clara was thinking when she decided to risk the perilous journey to a new land and leave behind everything she knew. I don't know how much thought she gave to her potential descendants and the life they would have as a result of her choice, or how much she was motivated by her own more immediate desires. Nevertheless, she set in motion a chain of events that shaped my life, giving me more choices, more freedoms, more privilege. I'm deeply grateful to her as a good ancestor.

Everyone alive today is skywriting the most important legacy of their lives in atmospheric carbon. Long after our names and faces and deeds have faded from living memory, long after any genetic or creative or physical or digital traces of us are gone, this carbon legacy will define us in the minds and stories of our distant descendants. It will literally define the terms of their lives: where they can live, how they can make a living, what kind of civilization and nature surround them. We will be remembered for our carbon legacy by far more people than we'll ever share a meal with or know by name.

Carbon Is Forever

"A diamond is forever." That De Beers clich, in use since 1947, is to a certain extent true. Diamonds are composed of pure carbon. Carbon is the building block of life, found in all known life-forms. Living bodies, from plants to humans, are first and foremost water, which helps regulate temperature, circulate nutrients, and flush waste. But this temporary and variable internal lake drains away to join a new river when we die. What remains is largely carbon. The same carbon atoms have been circulating in a marvelous cycle between air, rocks, soil, water, and living creatures for about half a billion years, since land plants figured out how to turn sunlight and air into humble mosses, then towering trees, greening the earth with the magic of photosynthesis.

How much carbon is in which stage of the cycle largely controls the climate and therefore the habitability of planet Earth. Climate is the long-term average of weather in a particular place. As the saying goes, climate is what you expect; weather is what you get. Carbon in the atmosphere acts like a thermostat. It is the atmospheric level of carbon that primarily determines the temperature to which the planet will eventually heat. When humans burn plants, we put the carbon those plants drew from the air to build their leaves and trunks back in the atmosphere. In the chemical reaction of burning, two oxygen atoms glom on to one carbon atom, forming carbon dioxide. CO2 represents 75 percent of heat-trapping emissions; methane and nitrous oxide make up most of the rest. These greenhouse gases trap heat near the Earth's surface instead of letting it escape into space. This extra heat warms the air and land and upper oceans.

Looking back over time, across the world, continents and oceans sing a coherent chorus: It's warming! The evidence for warming is found in decades of satellite and ocean buoy records; centuries of land thermometer and written records, like Thoreau's Concord journal, from which we know that plants now flower earlier in warmer springs than they did in his time; and millennia of environmental records quietly curated in the bodies of trees and corals and in the pollen lining lake beds. From these ancient records, we know the climate has been relatively stable for the last ten thousand years. Not coincidentally, human civilization was founded and flourished during this benign climate.

Humans have now markedly warmed the world, by approximately 1¡C above its pre-industrial average. Compared with history, today's warming is shockingly fast. A new color scheme, purple, had to be introduced in maps of Australia and the globe to show how much warming has already occurred above the previous end of the scale, red.

We know that today's warming is caused by humans through a combination of observations, theory, and models. Observed measurements show that CO2 has increased 40 percent in the air; enough carbonic acid has been formed from CO2 dissolving in the oceans to increase their acidity 26 percent. Atmospheric measurements sensitive enough to distinguish tiny variations in the global concentration of CO2 pinpoint the source of this carbon from cities and factories. The warming observed is greater over land than over oceans, at higher latitudes, in the upper oceans, and lower in the atmosphere: all consistent with what physics predicts from humans burning carbon on land. Humans have likely caused more than 100 percent of warming to date, because natural trends alone (from variations in the sun and volcanic outputs) would have caused a slight cooling. In short: It's us.

For millennia, essentially the only carbon humans added to the atmosphere came from cutting and sometimes burning plants that grew within their lifetimes ("green" carbon), and from plowing and cultivating soil (a huge library of organic carbon built by generation after generation of decomposed plant roots and leaves). About 30 percent of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593328175
• ISBN 13: 9780593328170
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland