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Book review: "The Climate Book" by Greta Thunberg (Ed)
July 3, 2025
It
would be obvious to any climate change denier that I'm what is
sneeringly called a "warmist", but as I've also been called an
"evolutionist" and a "vaccinationist" by other branches of science
denial, I don't really care. A medicine denier once outed me as a
member of the Illuminati, but obviously I can't comment in that,
just as I can neither confirm nor deny accusations that I am
simultaneously employed by both the CIA and Mossad.
I
recently attended a climate change denial seminar, and before I
went I made a Climate Change Denial Bingo card, containing 24
"arguments" against the reality of climate change that are
regularly used. The first speaker ticked 13 of the boxes and the
remaining speakers filled all except one of the rest.
Thankfully, we were not offered any YouTube videos as
"evidence". You can see the filled in card by clicking on the
image on the left.
This amazing book, published in 2022, addresses almost all of the spurious "arguments" thrown out by the deniers, although they are always capable of coming up with some variations. Greta Thunberg was 19 when she put this together and she contributed 17 of the essays, each as an introduction to one of the subsections.
The book is divided into five parts:
How climate works
How our planet is changing
How it affects us
What we've
done about it
What we must do now
with the parts divided into 17 subsections and 84 articles by well qualified contributors. (See the contributors here.) And in case you think that these are just opinions the articles are fully referenced, although to keep the book under 500 pages the references can be found at https://theclimatebook.org/ where there is a lot more information about the book.
Fighting misinformation is difficult (see also "Facts and other lies" by Ed Coper), and in this case much of the misinformation is well funded for ideological and corporate reasons. Strangely, there are people who don't believe in the fact of climate change for no apparent reason other than that they just don't believe it - you can see them screeching "HOAX" (almost always in capital letters) and hating electric cars and renewable energy without having to dive too deep into social media. They can't explain why they think this way, they just do.
This book goes a long way towards fighting and refuting the
mis- and disinformation spread about climate. Unfortunately, the
people who need to read and understand it will probably just
dismiss it as a flood of woke coming from a silly little girl.
Even if they read it.
Morton's Demon will probably
rear
its head and they won't change their position.
This book comes highly recommended. You won't read it in an afternoon, but however long it takes will be worth the effort.
You can get a copy from Bathurst library, by interlibrary loan or you can even buy a copy from the usual places.
About the Editor
It would be difficult
for anyone who has read a magazine, a newspaper or
watched television news over the last few years to be unaware of
Greta Thunberg. She first came to prominence in 2018, when at
just 15 she initiated protests to get governments to address
climate change. Her achievements and activities since then have
been
well documented, so there's no need to repeat them
here.
Picture credit - Kushal Das
One thing that is amazing about Greta is the visceral hatred of her shown by climate change deniers. I don't mean that they just dislike her - they actively hate her. As examples - when she was declared Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2019, the photo of her on the cover showed her wearing trousers. I commented that one of the "crimes" for which Joan of Arc was executed was wearing men's clothes and people responded that they hoped that someone would burn Greta to death; when she recently participated in a symbolic attempt to deliver aid to Gaza there were suggestions that the boat should be sunk so that she would drown.
When I think of this I'm reminded of the words of William Hazlitt in 1822 - "do something to show such pluck, or as much self-possession as this, before you assume a superiority which you have never given a single proof of by one action in the whole course of your lives". And I love the way Greta responds with wit, which just enrages her critics more.
The background image
The image in the background is "Warning Stripes" by Edward Hawkins, Professor of climate science at the University of Reading, and is used here under a Creative Commons licence.
Professor Hawkins had this to say about it:
No words. No numbers. No graphs. Just a series of vertical, coloured stripes showing the progressive rise in global temperatures in a single, striking image. Each stripe on the cover of this book represents the average global temperature for a single year, starting on the back in 1634 and ending on the front with 2021. Shades of blue indicate cooler years, while red shows years that were hotter. The stark band of deep red stripes on the front demonstrates the unmistakable rapid heating of our planet in recent decades.
The Warming Stripes were designed to start essential conversations about climate change - and they do. They have been downloaded and shared by millions of people - from politicians and artists to weather presenters and rock stars - spreading the message that no corner of the globe is immune from the effects of climate change.
And speaking of people who deny science, and the effort needed to argue with them:
See more
from Sketchplanations here
And there's always this old favourite:
