The content is too big for 300 words. This Essay was posted on 8/24/2026.
I am still reading Under the Sky We Make by Kimberley Nicholas. According to the cover, the book is about how to be human in a warming world. It has been a while since I read a book about global warming, and this one gives me an update as of 2021, when it was published.
Under the Sky is different from other global warming books in that it concentrates on the human perspective rather than the physical science. By presenting the human side, this book opens up some new trains of thought about the problem of an overheated world.
Nicholas updates the current status of global warming and provides a glimpse into our future, if things remain about the same. She points out that Earth’s average temperature has gone up 1oC, and the warming process is accelerating. The oceans are particularly bad with coral reefs that are literally dying. Current projections have us increasing by 2oC by 2060, 3oC by 2070, and 3.5oC by 2100. At an increase of 3oC or about 5oF, the tropics would be virtually uninhabitable.
The book points out an obvious characteristic of global warming that we don’t often consider. The earth doesn’t heat up in a uniform way. The tropics heat up faster than the non-tropical latitudes, and the land masses heat up faster than the oceans. That means the 3.5oC average earth temperature increase is actually much greater in the tropics and also greater on land in the middle latitudes like the US.
Nicholas takes us on a personal journey and asserts that we can’t depend on technology alone to fix the problem. We must all make drastic changes to our life-styles and choices if mankind will survive this man-made global warming crisis. While you may have problems with some of the assertions in this book, one point is very clear. Given that the US is the biggest carbon polluter, if the US doesn’t get back on the global warming bandwagon, then world-wide efforts will fail and humanity won’t survive.
As I was reading Under the Sky, it reminded me that there is a much greater problem than corruption in the Trump administration. We might be greatly bruised by Trump’s corruption, but we will survive. We won’t survive the global warming problem unless we make a bipartisan effort to deal with global warming with or without Trump. And we can make our voices heard in November.
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