“Exactly the book we need at this moment. Stickel writes about our changing climate with a scientist’s clear-eyed rigor and a humanist’s deep understanding of the stakes of the decisions we as civilization have made and will make. This is a book that can help save the world.”—Rob Roensch, professor and Clary Endowed Chair, Oklahoma City University
“Jonathan J. Stickel serves as a refreshingly dispassionate, comprehensive tour guide to the defining issue of our time. Think of his book as an operating manual for a changing Earth, one that will help readers chart a path to a more joyous, healthy, and secure future for humanity.”—Auden Schendler, author, Terrible Beauty
“The Climate We've Made stands apart. Beyond a concise, lay summary of climate science, it offers a thought-provoking exploration of our philosophical kinship with nature and the psychology of human behavior and motivation—all set against the existential challenge of preventing or adapting to a changing climate. A welcome and distinctive contribution.”—John Cirucci, principal manager, VerdeTek and former chief engineer, ASU Center for Negative Carbon Emissions
“What is striking when reading Stickel's new book about climate change is that the problem is ultimately a human problem—created as much by our behaviors and social structures as the fossil fuel products we have used for over a century. It gave me many new things to think about!”—Gayle Gibson, senior fellow, Mission Possible Partnership
An excerpt from The Climate We've Made:
As members of the species Homo sapiens, we are self-aware and intelligent. Nature, out of its awesome mystery and despite nearly impossible odds, has given us humans our habitable planet Earth, diverse ecosystems, and plentiful food and material resources. At the same time, our bodies and minds are subject to biological laws of nature—human nature, if you will—that limit our physical capabilities and compel us to certain behaviors. Collectively, our individual human behaviors have given rise to societies and their concomitant institutions. Human societies have created magnificent technologies and have transformed Earth to suit our material needs and desires. When the exponential growth of humankind’s population and material consumption was observed in the mid-twentieth century, a few prominent scholars predicted humanity’s downfall within a few decades due to the collapse of food, energy, or other resources as human populations continued to grow. Each of those predictions, or at least their timing, has famously now been shown to be wrong, primarily due to our collective ingenuity to develop and deploy new technologies. Continued growth and prosperity of humankind seem to be inevitable and limitless.
Now we face climate change (a.k.a. global warming) that poses a serious threat to humanity and Earth as we know it—an existential threat that is different in magnitude and form than many other challenges we have faced in our short history. Scientists have known about the principles of climate change for more than one hundred years and have been collecting direct evidence for more than sixty years. Despite the best efforts of climate scientists, activists, and policymakers to effect change, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and temperatures continue to climb. Due to the potentially massive magnitude and scope of climate change, which could categorically alter human life and the entire Earth in profound ways, it is worth taking a step back and looking at it with a broader lens. Why is there such a wide disconnect between the climate disaster predicted by scientists and societies’ limited and ineffectual action to mitigate it? ...
Thus, I came to understand that climate change is much more than a scientific problem—it is also a social–political problem, an economic problem, and a problem for every individual human to contend with. How could I make sense of this? What will Earth be like for my children? What could I do as a scientist? As a human being? This book is my personal journey to find answers to these questions. To do so, I needed to look beyond the oft-repeated scientific claims and calls for individual action in order to gain a deeper understanding of climate change; not just the science but also humans’ relationship with Earth and what the long-term implications of climate change are for humanity. This required studying climate change from the added perspectives of philosophy and psychology.
When contemplating climate change, some authors assume that it is too late to save our current civilization and, hence, that meaningful contributions on climate change must come from the humanities, disciplines that are more capable of helping us understand our futile plight and documenting who we are for future generations, should humans remain on Earth at all. Everything else just amounts to making and consuming more stuff until the moment we die. While I do not yet agree with this fatalistic view, I am sympathetic to the idea that the humanities, too, should be engaged in addressing climate change. I make an attempt in this book to put climate change, as understood by the latest science, in the context of the human condition and human behaviors.