General introductory material
Emanuel, Kerry. What We Know About Climate Change. MIT Press, 2018.
Climate Science and Climate Risk: A Primer (PDF) by Kerry A. Emanuel.
Archer, David, and Stefan Rahmstorf. The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Climate change science
Eggleton, Tony. A Short Introduction to Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Steffen, Will, Johan Rockström, et al. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 33 (2018): 8252–8259.
Hausfather, Zeke. “Analysis: Why Scientists Think 100% of Global Warming Is Due to Humans.” Carbon Brief (2017).
Climate change models and simulation
EdGCM: Educational Global Climate Modeling
- EdGCM provides a research-grade GCM with a user-friendly interface that can be run on a desktop computer.
- An in-depth but accessible Q&A that pedagogically answers frequently-asked questions about climate models.
Climate Change: A Defining Challenge for the 21st Century?
- Dame Julia Slingo FRS gives the Sir Thomas Gresham Annual Lecture 2018 at Gresham College. Emphasizes the uses of simulations.
Animations of the Earth’s Carbon Cycle
Climate simulation games
Climate Interactive’s C-ROADS World Climate Simulation
- This is a game which lets you play around with different emissions scenarios and consider impacts on climate, economies, and people.
Climate model codes (in order of increasing complexity)
Interactive toy climate models
- Radiative transfer and the Greenhouse Effect
- Effects of doubling CO2 on the outgoing longwave radiation spectrum in MODTRAN
- Other models
Idealized model frameworks
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Brian Rose (University at Albany)’s climlab: process-oriented climate modeling
- A helpful framework for building your own simple climate model from the bottom-up
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Monteiro, Joy Merwin, Jeremy McGibbon, and Rodrigo Caballero. “sympl (v. 0.4. 0) and climt (v. 0.15. 3)–Towards a flexible framework for building model hierarchies in python.” Geoscientific Model Development 11, no. 9 (2018): 3781–3794.
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University of Exeter’s isca: a framework for idealized global circulation modelling
- The kind of climate model used to test climate dynamics hypotheses without all the complications of the real system
The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Community Earth System Model (CESM)
- This is a world-class climate model and is the caliber of model used to inform policy makers
Validating and verifying models
Oreskes, Naomi, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, and Kenneth Belitz. “Verification, validation, and confirmation of numerical models in the earth sciences.” Science 263, no. 5147 (1994): 641–646.
Saltelli, Andrea, and Silvio Funtowicz. “When all models are wrong.” Issues in Science and Technology 30, no. 2 (2014): 79–85.
Computer science technology applied to climate change
Rolnick, David, Priya L. Donti, et al. “Tackling climate change with machine learning.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05433 (2019).
- Has an excellent 708-entry bibliography!
- See their website at Climate Change AI
Victor, Bret. “What can a technologist do about climate change?” Worry Dream (2015).
The Pangeo Software Stack for big data geoscience (including climate)
Impact and speed of climate change
Fourth National Climate Assessment Vol II (Executive Summary). U.S. Global Change Research Program, November 2018.
Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Tim Duggan Books, 2020.
Figueres, Christiana, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, et al. “Three years to safeguard our climate.” Nature News 546, no. 7660 (2017): 593.
Xu, Yangyang, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, and David G. Victor. “Global warming will happen faster than we think.” Nature (2018): 30–32.
Maps of Extreme Heat from the Climate Impact Lab
Interactive map from Carbonbrief
- How climate change affects extreme weather around the world
Mitigation methods
McMachon, Jeff. “New solar + battery price crushes fossil fuels, buries nuclear.” Forbes, July 1, 2019.
NREL (National Renewable Energy Lab, part of Department of Energy)
- Renewable electricity futures study
Carbon capture and sequestration
- Herzog, Howard J. Carbon Capture. MIT Press, 2018.
- Video on CCS
- Evaluates methods for reducing emissions.
Project VESTA (Carbon Capture using Olivine)
- These models are used to answer central questions about climate change, from how the world could avoid 1.5C of global warming at the lowest cost, through to the implications of countries’ current pledges to cut emissions.
Adaptation
Climate change adaptation on Wikipedia
Geoengineering
Pearce, Fred. “Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option.” Yale Environment 360 (2019).
Uncertainty and risk management, economics, and entrepreneurship
Pindyck, Robert S. “The social cost of carbon revisited.” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 94 (2019): 140–160.
- See related papers on [Pindyck’s web site](http:// http://web.mit.edu/rpindyck/www/papers.htm)))
DICE: The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economic Model by William Nordhaus
Park, Alex, Andy Kroll, et al. “A brief history of big tax breaks for oil companies.” Mother Jones (2014).
Ellsmoor, James. “United States spend ten times more on fossil fuel subsidies than education.” Forbes (2019).
Winn, Zach. “How Greentown Labs became the epicenter of clean tech.” MIT News (2019)
Policy options: getting from here to there
Rockström, Johan, Owen Gaffney, et al. “A roadmap for rapid decarbonization.” Science 355, no. 6331 (2017): 1269–1271.
Fargione, Joseph, Steven Bassett, et al. “Natural climate solutions for the United States.” Science Advances 4, no. 11 (2018): eaat1869.
- Documentary on making the transition in energy by Scott Tinker (Bureau of Economic Geology and the Switch Energy Alliance, in Texas)
Activism
Greta Thunberg
Movies
An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
Politics and propaganda
Merchants of Doubt
- Earth 101: Merchants of Doubt: How Climate Science Became a Victim of the Cold War by Erik Conway
- Merchants of Doubt (Movie)
- Merchants of Doubt (Book) by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes
Muyskens, John and Kevin Uhrmacher. “Where 2020 Democrats Stand on Climate Change.” Washington Post (2019).
Stubley, Peter. “Trump dismisses need for climate change action.” Independent (2019).
International agreements
Visualizations
- Gives graphic representation of temperature increase of any location.
Mapped: How every part of the world has warmed—and could continue to warm
Climate Spirals by Ed Hawkins
Other MIT material
MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI)
Welcome to Climate Change: A Survivor’s Guide to Mitigation, Adaptation, Suffering
- Special issue of MIT Technology Review (May/June 2019)
A Plan for Action on Climate Change (October 21, 2015) by Reif et el.
Other significant sources of information
Other websites and social media on climate change
- Evaluates media stories about climate change.
#climatechange
- Dr. Katherine Hayhoe’s list of 2000+ scientists who study climate
Podcasts
- Climate One (covers all things climate, with both one-on-one interviews and panel discussions)
- Political Climate (U.S. Climate Politics, hosted by a journalist, a Democrat, and a Republican)
- TILclimate (Short and accessible interviews w/ MIT researchers working on climate)
- Energy Transition Show (Long and extremely wonky interviews w/ researchers studying the ongoing energy transition worldwide)
- Forecast (Long and in-depth interviews w/ climate scientists)
Information on individual action
Frost, Natasha. “If you care about your impact on the planet, you should stop flying.” Quartz, July 3, 2019.
Carbon footprint calculators and carbon offsets
- Carbon Footprint LTD Carbon Calculator
- Conservation.org Carbon Footprint Calculator
- EPA Carbon Footprint Calculator
- terrapass
