Jelmer Mommers - How Are We Going to Explain This?: Our Future on a Hot Earth

Praise for Jelmer Mommers and How Are We Going to Explain This?

We have to dream bigger, as Jelmer Mommers does. The likely warming of the next few decades can make the future look practically unlivable. But we will find ways to live in it, perhaps even thrive. Mommers helps us see howhow we might remake the world, secure that future, and above all stop seeing the present as a conceptual cage constricting our hopes rather than a husk to leave behind.

David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth

One of the most important books Ive read this year. How Are We Going to Explain This? is a crystal clear treatise on where we are and what we need to do right now. Especially recommended for those who feel hopeless.

Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists and Humankind

As a journalist, Jelmer Mommers has broken important stories about how we got in our current climate mess; as a thinker, he shows us there may still be some ways out, if we move with grace and speed. A fine account of where we stand, and where we could go if we wanted to!

Bill McKibben, author, environmentalist, and activist

At a time when despair, fabrication, and partisanship are combining to prevent vital action, How Are We Going to Explain This? is a much-needed, joyful, clear, and practical companion. Read thisit could save your planet. Give it to your friends and colleaguesits their planet, too.

A. L. Kennedy, author of The Little Snake

A great book on climate change: how we got here but most importantly how we get out of the mess we have created. Shines a light on the path forward with clarity and determination.

Christiana Figueres, architect of the Paris climate agreement, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 2010 to 2016

We are at a crossroads. As we recover from the corona pandemic, we can choose to proceed toward an uninhabitable earth or take a turn toward sustainability. Jelmer Mommers shows us that the choice really is up to all of usand that we still have time. Once youve read this book, youll know how to play your part. The astonishing thing is getting things right has never been so simple.

Jeremy Leggett, social entrepreneur and author of The Carbon War

An important contribution to the most existential threat of our day: climate change and environmental collapse. What sets this book apart from others is that the author combines hard science with the narratives necessary to save us. We are taken on a trip from gut bacteria and dancing bees to agricultural practices and CO2 sequesteringthe micro and the macro beautifully linked to provide us with the big picture with all its hope and horror.

Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender

Provides a unique take on the challenge to avert a climate crisis. It provides important insights into our dire situation, but it also sketches out a persuasive path forward. A must-read if you want to know where we stand and what we can and must still do!

Michael Mann, distinguished professor, Penn State University, and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and The Madhouse Effect

If there is a silver lining to the COVID crisis, it is that we have demonstrated that we can work together for the common good. Jelmer Mommers brilliantly captures the essence of this spirit and applies it to the climate crisis, for which we are rapidly reaching an inflection point. Mommers beautifully argues why we must all act togetherand act nowdispelling feelings of lethargy and hopelessness along the way. A wonderful and prescient stimulus for those who yearn for a more equitable and sustainable future.

Simon Taylor, cofounder and director, Global Witness

As more of humanity adjusts to living with crises, we need books like this, which tell us what we can dofrom small steps to big onesto find our way to a new normal.

May Boeve, executive director, 350.org and 350 Action Fund

In this truly outstanding book, Jelmer Mommers exposes the complex ways in which climate change intersects with other environmental and social challenges facing humankindfrom vanishing bees to oceanic dead zones to endless resource wars. And he explains with remarkable clarity and simplicity how the solutions to these problems are as interconnected as their causes. In so doing, he presents a compelling, workable vision for addressing climate change and creating a more just and livable world.

Carroll Muffett, president, Center for International Environmental Law

Climate change is a story so often told in the future tense. But Mommers roots it firmly in the present. The problem, the consequences, and the solutionright here, right now.

Leo Hickman, editor of Carbon Brief

Clear-eyed and compelling, this book is a much-needed antidote to despair; an inspiration to create the narrative our (grand)children will tell about how we forged a genuinely sustainable world. Read it and make it so!

Peter C. Frumhoff, PhD, director of Science and Policy and chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists

Explaining the climate story clearly and convincingly: Jelmer Mommers can do it like no other.

David Van Reybrouck, author of Congo

Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

I wont lie: climate change is a disaster. Ive been working on it continuously for five years now and it still makes me recoil in horror. So if you hesitated to pick up this book, I completely understand.

To begin with, theres the word climate. The problem isnt so much its technical meaning: the average weather over a period of at least thirty years. The term was thought up to enable people to make general claims about the weather in a particular place. The Netherlands, for instance, has a more moderate, cooler climate than India. For most people and for most of our recent history, the climate has been a given, about as exciting as the slow flow of glaciers or the composition of the air we breathe. Background. Fodder for experts.

But we all know that the word climate currently has completely different connotations. Threat. Danger. In recent years, the experts have been telling us in ever starker language that the climate is changing drastically due to human influence. Not in one place, not in the Netherlands or India, but everywhere at once. Theyre telling us that the earth is warming up, that rising sea levels are threatening coastal cities, that heat waves are becoming more ferocious, that the global food supply is under pressure. Theyre telling us that continuing on our current path will almost certainly lead to worldwide catastrophesand is already doing so.

On my computer I have a folder where I collect news and studies about the changing climate. Its an expanding invitation to despair. At least once a month another article comes along to make me think, Its even worse than I thought! Just as Im getting over the shock of one extensive study stating that in this century hundreds of millions of people will suffer water shortages due to melting ice in the Himalayas,

No one knows if it will come to that. Its also possible that temperatures will rise more slowly than currently expected and that well adapt better than seems possible in our wildest dreams. But we have no guarantee whatsoever of those outcomes, and theres no alternative earth.