Climate Change: The Fork at the End of Now

“Arnold Toynbee wrote that civilizations die from suicides, not murder.” Thus begins the argument of Micha Tomkiewicz’s compelling new textbook on global climate change. This introduction to the earth’s physical climate and the current human-induced challenges affecting it first explains the scientific basis for observed and expected changes in the earth’s climate and then continues on to persuasively present the moral consequences of human action—and inaction—with regard to energy use and consumption.

As the Foreword by Professor Geraldine DeLuca ably says, “For while the science of climate change could be imprecise in some details and even slightly wrong in timing, it is clear that once we pass a critical point in the ability of the planet to adapt to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the consequences amount to a global genocide—but a self-inflicted one.”

Written to be a textbook for his own course—while reaching out to a much wider audience of general readers, Professor Tomkiewicz begins the first half of the book with a short, intense course on the physics and chemistry of climate. In it you will gain a working vocabulary of concepts and principles, including answers to such fundamental questions as:

• What is the carbon cycle?”
• What is energy? and
• What is biomass?

Ample illustrations and frequent dialogue boxes for further instruction will help make vivid the lessons you in learn the book’s text.

In the second half of the book, you will learn the technological and public policy paths available to us as we work toward more effective ways to deal with the predicted global climate changes ahead. You will learn about existing and proposed sources of alternative fuel and the costs involved in shiſting from fossil fuels and nuclear fission, with their attendant dangers, toward other forms of energy that are sustainable without adversely affecting the climate. And while some of these have yet to be developed, you will learn that the catastrophic consequences of our pursuit of more of the same sources of fuel will become harder to ignore.

Micha Tomkiewicz is a professor of physics at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and professor of physics and chemistry at the Graduate Center of CUNY. He is also Director of both the Environmental Studies Program and the Electrochemistry Institute at Brooklyn College, and he was divisional editor of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society. He has been a Broeklundian Professor at Brooklyn College, a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and a Wolf Fellow of the Weizmann Institute in Israel. Author of co-author of over 140 scientific articles, and written numerous book chapters, review articles, edited books, and invited columns, he has concentrated recently on developing ways for non-scientists to understand the challenges and choices created by the process of climate change.