The Climate Book: Welcome to Greta Thunberg’s zero-bulls*** revolution

This is a deeply damning, but more importantly, forward-thinking collection of essays everyone should read, writes Harry Cockburn

Greta Thunberg addresses a crowd in Berlin (AP)

"The voices in this world which have the most power belong to those who are destroying it", writes Greta Thunberg in the outro of her spectacular new book.

It is a sentence which encapsulates the skill with which she can speak the blatant truths our society can scarcely acknowledge, but it is also a damning conclusion and part of a revolutionary call to arms.

Her zero-tolerance level for bulls*** is the beacon which has not only won her acclaim, but also lights the way through this collection of essays, evidence and potential solutions written by an astonishing list of experts, scientists, activists and authors.

The book replicates Thunberg’s career to date – highly adept at pulling out the most salient facts, explaining precisely what they mean, and the steps which must be taken to remedy the problems – with no compromises.

But unlike her short sharp speeches to world leaders, the scope of this work is planetary in scale.

It is a massive undertaking in which she calls on the best people possible to help her make sense of the rapid trashing of the natural world and the ecosystems life depends on.

At this point in her career – aged 19 – instead of writing any kind of self-aggrandising book heavy on her triumphs, this work instead elevates the voices of others – showcasing in its very substance the way forward in tackling crises.

Though of course in this instance Thunberg plays inspiring leader under a banner of global revolution for those under the yoke of nefarious power.

Each section of the book contains an essay by Thunberg herself, introducing and synthesising what she has learned, drawing down the extraordinary quantity of information and channelling it into a form of urgent momentum towards change.

Most contributors are academics and scientists, but there are some famous names too. Margaret Atwood, George Monbiot, Naomi Klein and Thomas Piketty all make significant contributions.

We start with the emergence of life on our planet – the magic and fragility of the carbon cycle, and how it has shaped evolution. Every single mass extinction event is associated with huge disruptions to the carbon cycle. And we are seeing another disruption right now.

The emergence of homo sapiens and our unique position of power means we have become "the evolutionary force that will decide the fate of every species, as well as the habitats in which those species live," writes the University of California’s Beth Shapiro.

But our real problems began very recently.

In the Civilisation and Extinction section, Pulitzer prize-winning economist Elizabeth Colbert highlights how "between 1945 and 2000 the  number of people in the world  tripled.  During the same period water use quadrupled, the marine fish catch increased sevenfold and fertiliser consumption rose tenfold.  Most of the population growth  occurred in the Global South. Most of the consumption was driven by the US and Europe."

We are, Thunberg says "sawing off the branch we’re living on".

The book catalogues incredible levels of human disgrace and our abuse of the planet, but also makes detailed attempts to understand why, so we can learn and move on.

Copies of Greta Thunberg’s ‘The Climate Book’ for sale in London on October 27 2022 (AFP via Getty)

We are given a crash course in the complex and highly alarming science of environmental tipping points, grapple with the psychology of mindless consumerism, learn about the water cycle, the jet stream, ocean currents, extreme weather, and much more.

Paulo Ceppi from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London tells us why we need to learn more about clouds and our influence on them – they both shade us, and insulate us depending on their height in the atmosphere and the type of cloud, but they are fragile. Screw too much with the clouds and they will screw us up.

In a moving essay titled "Insects", the University of Sussex’s Dave Goulson writes about the joy of collecting yellow and black caterpillars as a young child and the delight in watching them transform into striking black and red cinnabar moths – one experience which put him on a path to becoming an expert on insects, particularly bees. His life’s work has been done in the shadow of an insect apocalypse, he explains, wiping the creatures to which he has devoted his career from the face of the planet.

"The stripy cinnabar moths that I collected as a boy have since declined in number by 83 per cent,  but there are still some left, and they could easily recover if we act now."

The devastating compendium of evidence presented here is an unflinchingly damning assessment of failure by governments to take charge of the deteriorating system.

Thunberg rails against the "ignorance" of leaders and their "embarrassingly low" level of knowledge on the biggest threat to our species.

"Humankind has not created this crisis – it was created by those in power," she writes, “and they knew exactly what priceless values they were sacrificing in order to make unimaginable amounts of money and to maintain a system that benefitted them."

"All that evidence puts the current best available science on a collision course with our current  economic system and with the way of life many people in the Global North now consider their right."

Thunberg puts forward a serious call for a radical overhaul in how societies around the world operate.

Yes, it is earnest. Yes, it has the undisputable ring of callow youth, but who cares? That is literally the point here.

"We cannot live sustainably within today’s economic system. Yet that is what we are constantly being told we can do," Thunberg argues.

In the later essays, there is expert analysis on how we can: recover from consumerism, avoid climate apathy, change our diets, change farming and fishing techniques, our energy sources, return land to nature through rewilding and recalibrate our conservation expectations, and how we can learning from the Covid-19 pandemic how to put the world on an emergency footing.

Ultimately, this is an unexpectedly uplifting volume, fizzing with the world’s best science and analysis, and what we can now do with it.

Anyone interested in existing on our planet should read this.

The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg is published by Penguin Random House.