From the intergalactic dance of dark energy and gravity, to the push and pull of our sun’s protonic plasma, to the ebb and flow of Earth’s winds and waves, a series of delicate balances supports life on our “Goldilocks Planet.” A nice balance of gravity's pull and dark energy's push resulted in a rich quilt of galaxies and stars, with us ending up in a comfortable Green galaxy, in a prime-mid spiral section of the Milky Way galaxy, rotating around a nice sun (not too close, not too far) gently emitting in the yellow part of the energy spectrum. A healthy quantity of atmosphere and greenhouse gasses, along with the Van Allen belts, keeps out most high-energy particles and maintains a reasonable temperature. The Hadley and Walker Circulations pitch in, creating clockwise rotating circulation cells in and over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, transporting heat away from the equator and depositing it in poleward latitudes. These circulations bring life-giving moisture to the continents, supporting abundant life. Note, however, that the manual for Spaceship Earth does not contain a warranty. Right there on the cover, next to the red “Don't Panic” logo, is emblazoned “No Returns If Opened.”

Here, framed in the context of a humorous story, we learn about the electromagnetic spectrum, entropy, negentropy, and available potential energy. We learn to see stars as tremendous gravity-driven concentrations of matter and energy, uniquely capable of supporting increased complexity and life on our planet. Seen from this perspective, the vast empty reaches of space allow for the formation of stars, which in turn support life. Energetically closed systems are doomed to entropic heat death, as mixing drives the system inexorably toward a boring end. But energetically open systems, like the Earth, absorb solar radiation and turn it into growing complexity on a planet hovering in a “magic” and narrow temperature range. This “negentropic” system can evolve over time. This increasing complexity arises because this incoming energy supports temperature gradients that drive weather and climate systems. Climate change adds more energy, and this extra energy can create more intense gradients, and more intense weather and climate events. Understanding this simple fact improves our ability to recognize and predict the dangerous impacts occurring now. At large scales, exceptionally warm tropical waters drive drought-inducing semi-global rainfall disruptions. At regional scales, warmer Ocean and atmosphere conditions can lead to more intense storms and hurricanes. As more energy moves through our Earth system, we are experiencing more extreme weather and climate.

The most important mechanism of climate change can be understood by everyone: Why do greenhouse gasses have such a direct warming effect on our planet? This chapter approaches this question with a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) attitude.First, the humorous tale of Stinky, Dinxie, Bif, and Moo teaches us how the greenhouse effect really works. It's a straightforward matter of balancing energy, not a matter for belief. Also, it turns out that the atmosphere is really thin, and has a lot less actual mass than we might at first think. Then, this understanding is augmented by lots and lots of data. Multiple independent data sources hammer home convergent evidence identifying very rapid levels of observed warming. Looking at air temperatures, ocean temperatures, and global sea levels, we see extremely rapid rates of warming, rates that have increased dramatically in the last decade. 2015–2019 stand out as exceptionally warm. Global temperatures are modeled extremely well by climate models, while the observed warming doesn’t track at all with changes in incoming solar radiation, and these changes are very small energetically. We don’t need to believe in climate change; we can understand and observe it. The chapter introduction and a sidebar use the devastating Thomas Fire to set this warming in context.

The stories that we tell ourselves shape our lives, express our values, and guide our body politic. Drought, Flood, Fire has made a compelling case that climate change is hurting people now and contributing to expensive catastrophes. But there are also a lot good things going on in the world. Infant deaths are declining. More kids are going to school. We are becoming much wealthier, more productive, and inventive. Countries like Germany and states like California make it clear that we can grow economically while reducing our emissions. We can afford to be like a good cowboy and wear the White Hat. Rising greenhouse gas emissions are also symptomatic of beneficial growth. Education, technology, and rapid economic expansion have lifted billions from poverty. Between 1961 and 2050, we will carry out humanity's greatest experiment in parallel processing, as billions of individuals grow, think, discover, and consume. We are living in the midst of a potentially positive time bomb. Never have so many seen so much, known so much, or done so much – or had such a profound capacity to affect the world for good or ill. We can avoid a global climate catastrophe. But we need to believe in science, believe in each other, and do what is right.

Scientific advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth century meant climate began to be understood as something to be measured and described technically; yet the supposed objectivity of this scientific discourse became inseparable from the subjectivity of social comment and prejudice. With its interest in putting different discourses in tension, Modernist writing is well suited to challenge these conceptions, and the growing literary recognition of under- or unrepresented communities saw a diversity of cultures being written. While Modernist writers such as Stein and Stevens complicated easy assertions about the social effects of climate, Southern and African-American writers including Faulkner, Hurston and Hughes contested generalized or racially inflected climatic theories. It is the economy rather than environment that places the figures of American Modernist literature in their privileged or precarious positions, which only then determines whether they can exploit or are subject to the climate. Such writing reveals the limitations and failures of technical and economic understandings of the environment, troubling them with personal and bodily experience of weather.

This essay examines the degeneration thesis, as formulated by Buffon and taken up in the so-called dispute of the New World. Early colonial observers such as Acosta and Catesby engaged with the classical climate-determinist paradigm, with its north–south orientation of climate zones. Buffon drew on these natural history observations, Enlightenment social theory, and the new geoscience and reoriented climate determinism on an east–west axis. Buffon posited that America had emerged more recently than Europe from oceanic submergence and was thus colder and wetter – and that therefore America’s climate was more favorable to the production of supposedly inferior animals such as insects and reptiles and less favorable to larger mammals and humans. Implications for human development were vigorously contested by Americans such as Jefferson and reoriented again along a global north–south axis, notably by Hegel. The degeneration thesis enjoyed a long legacy, surfacing in the United States in nativist-populist responses to demographic issues. The essay concludes by identifying two such episodes, early twentieth-century nativism and the new nativism of the twenty-first century.