Holiday Gift Guide: The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming by Guy Dauncy

Issues of climate have been in the news a lot in the last few weeks, sometimes for better reasons than others. We’ve never spent quite this much time thinking about where all of this is leading. For a lot of people, the realities of global warming are difficult to accept because, if we acknowledge that the Earth is melting, then what? Where do we go from there?

While there is no shortage of books on the topic, few are both as informational and lucid as The Climate Challenge (New Society Publishers), energy maverick Guy Dauncy’s take on the topic.

Dauncy (Stormy Weather, Enough Blood Shed) is an author, speaker and futurist who attacks his topic with passion, knowledge and a surprising amount of humor.

Dauncy tackles the of topic climate change at the source: with a brief history of Man on Earth. Historic photos show blast furnaces in the forest and charcoal burner’s huts. Then we are told -- in-depth but in an entirely clear way -- about various gases and black carbon. In short: before he gets to the solution, Duancy carefully looks at the problem, A sort of “how did I get here” moment that will explain the seriousness of the situation to all but the most skeptical of watchers.

While the problem is well explained, most of the book is given over to solutions. “What then must we do?” he asks before going on to answer his own question. The answers are clear, if not always easy, but Duancy does a memorable job of getting us off the couch and into the field. As Duancy says at the beginning of Chapter 86: “Scramble! This is serious.”