Climate--A New Story
by Charles Eisenstein · first published 2018
12mentions
3recommended by
4HN commenters
2018–2025first – last mentioned
75% recommend25% neutral
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Anyone who found this story intriguing should immediately go buy "Climate: A New Story" by Charles Eisenstein. He explores how we use "war language" when talking about environmental issues and how that undercuts our efforts... then he proposes how we get out of that conversational rut,…
on “Environmentalist didn't speak for 17 years to learn how to listen to opponents” ↗I want to drop a book recommendation in here for everyone else that feels panicked and mad that no one around them is panicking enough. Climate - A New Story by Charles Eisenstein The author suggests that we might have the causation backwards. It's not that everything is dying because the climate is getting worse -- it's that the climate's getting worse because…
on “Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen by 2048” ↗…But on the other hand, the atmosphere and oceans storing more energy is not strictly what's causing our problems, but rather the severity and unpredictability of the weather. Charles Eisenstein's book "Climate - a new story" convinced me that biomass and large healthy ecosystems act as a buffer on weather, that forests change the atmosphere around them and attract rain fall, all kinds of complex interactions that we've taken…
on “US-Canada heatwave 'virtually impossible' without warming” ↗…grasslands store hundreds of gigatons of carbon. It can't just be planting trees, it has to be cultivating rich ecosystems: the more living things the better. I've been converted by Charles Eisenstein's book "Climate: a new story" - he makes a strong case that we're only obsessed with carbon because we don't have good ways of measuring anything else, and that while of course the greenhouse effect is real, the negative effects…
on “We need to take CO2 out of the sky” ↗…as a buffer for storing energy, carbon, and water - the more life on earth, the more stable the atmosphere becomes. (I'm no climate scientist, this is my impression from reading Charles Eisenstein's Climate: a New Story, totally turned me around on being fatalistic about climate change)
on “Launch HN: Living Carbon (YC W20) – Trees that capture and store more carbon” ↗…honestly I agree. You can spend thousands of dollars or thousands of hours of volunteering, but its the politicians that are deciding how to spend trillions. Outside of that, I can recommend the book "Climate - a new story" by Charles Eisenstein, it argues against focusing on a single metric of CO2 ppm (and includes an aside on the war-analogy we default to when we decide to fight something ;). Basically it suggests we…
on “Ask HN: What can I do to actively fight climate change?” ↗trees basically perform cloud-seeding by releasing micro-droplets of oils into the air "climate: a new story" by charles eisenstein is a great resource on an alternative understanding to climate change then simply "CO2 bad", which he presents as a red herring to ecosystem destruction conventional wisdom is…
on “A Revelation About Trees Is Messing with Climate Calculations” ↗Read it for free here: https://charleseisenstein.org/books/climate-a-new-story/
on “Environmentalist didn't speak for 17 years to learn how to listen to opponents” ↗…tech-intensive and potentially world-altering prospects of massive carbon-sucking machines or injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to induce artificial cooling) For anyone interested, his recent book is "Climate: A new story." It was the most meditative and thought-provoking collection of ideas that I've read on the state of the environment and climate. It's also incredibly hopeful without being blindly optimistic. In fact,…
on “Carbon Removal Technologies” ↗…to measure than biomass and ecosystem complexity, everyone is focused on sucking carbon out of the air when we need to be restoring grasslands, forests, and coral reefs. Source: Charles Eisenstein's "Climate: A New Story"
on “$100M xPrize for Carbon Removal” ↗…there's plenty of good, too. But there's a lot that gets missed in choosing what and how we measure. [1] This example is lifted largely from a favorite author, Charles Eisenstein, from his new book "Climate: A New Story." You can read up on the Tehri dam. If it breaks (and some seismologists think it's a real possibility), it will cause untold more devastation.
on “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World [video]” ↗I am reminded of a passage from Charles Eisenstein's "Climate, A New Story": Explorers and naturalists of previous centuries give staggering testimony to the incredible natural wealth of North America and other places before colonization. Here are some images from another book,…
on “Rewilding the Self” ↗