A Brief Review Of “Dire Predictions”, 2nd Edition, By Mann And Kump
The reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contain the sum total of scientific knowledge on climate change science, mitigation, and adaptation. The long lead times needed to produce such comprehensive documents means that they inevitably omit the latest scientific findings when the reports are finally approved and published, but those reports are still a treasure trove for researchers working on most aspects of climate science and solutions.
What are great resources for researchers, however, are not necessarily accessible for the intelligent lay reader. For that much broader audience there is the excellent compilation of the IPCC’s findings from Professors Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump of Pennsylvania State University. The book, titled Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change—the Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC, is now out in its second edition.
A real strength of this book is that the authors distill what’s important, so you don’t have to. The book is visual, as the title implies. It has pictures on every page, and is chock full of key graphs from the IPCC reports. The prose is clear and concise, and is written for a Scientific American level audience (i.e., lay readers who take an intelligent interest in science and who are not scared off by graphs). If graphs aren’t your thing, you can still learn a great deal by just reading the text.
The structure of the book is very close to the 1stedition, with five major sections:
Part 1: Climate Change Basics
Part 2: Climate Change Projections
Part 3: The Impacts of Climate Change
Part 4: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change
Part 5: Solving Climate change
In each section you’ll find short (1-3 page) sections covering each key topic, so it’s relatively easy going. The 2nd edition contains 16 more pages than the 1st edition, and that new material highlights findings that have become more salient in recent years. Those new topics include:
Where is all that heat going?
Suffocating the ocean
Welcome to the Anthropocene
The 2012 North American heat wave
Comparing climate model predictions with observations
How sensitive is the climate?
Fossil-fuel emissions scenarios
The “faux pause”
Past IPCC projections: How did they do?
Tipping points, irreversibilities, and abrupt climate change
It’s all about the economy
The water-energy nexus
Dire Predictions is a wonderful summary of climate science for the lay reader, and I highly recommend it. If you pair it with Joe Romm’s Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know (which is equally readable and contains more extensive treatment of climate economics, policy, and solutions) you’ll have complete and up to date knowledge of climate change and what we can do about it. Both books together would work well as the basis for high school, college, and graduate level classes, or as the core resources for reading clubs exploring climate change. If you care about climate, these books are “best in class”.
References
IPCC. 2014. Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Field, C.B., V.R. Barros, D.J. Dokken, K.J. Mach, M.D. Mastrandrea, T.E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K.L. Ebi, Y.O. Estrada, R.C. Genova, B. Girma, E.S. Kissel, A.N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P.R. Mastrandrea, and L.L. White (eds.)]. Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. [http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/]
IPCC. 2014. Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change[Edenhofer, O., R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, A. Adler, I. Baum, S. Brunner, P. Eickemeier, B. Kriemann, J. Savolainen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow, T. Zwickel and J.C. Minx (eds.)]. Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. : Cambridge University Press. [http://mitigation2014.org]
IPCC. 2013. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. [http://www.climatechange2013.org]
Mann, Michael E., and Lee R. Kump. 2015. Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change–The Visual Guide to the Findings of the IPCC. 2nd ed. New York, NY: DK Publishing (A Penguin Random House Company). [http://amzn.to/1UeemaC]
Romm, Joseph. 2015. Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [http://amzn.to/1QgZw1V]
