adapted from a comment i made somewhere yesterday, and expanded a bit from my reading list. i read a lot of books about this subject (just an interest of mine) so if you want recommendations for books in the space i have many to offer.

here’s a few:

ordered by year

• Extreme Cities: Climate Chaos and the Urban Future by Ashley Dawson (2016)
• The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell (2017)
• Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future by Edward Struzik (2017)
• Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame by Michael Kodas (2017)
• Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution by Beth Gardiner (2019)
• The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption by Dahr Jamail (2020)
• The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science by Paul Behrens (2020)
• Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich (2021)
• The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next by Stephen J. Pyne (2021)
• Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, From 1979 to the Present by Eugene Linden (2022)
• Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince (2022)
• The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle (2023)

California specific appendix

• Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano (2020)
• Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson (2021)
• California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric–and What It Means for America’s Power Grid by Katherine Blunt (2022)

books i intend to read

• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
• Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe by Mario Alejandro Ariza (2020)
• The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis by Christina Conklin & Marina Psaros (2021)
• Fire, Storm and Flood: The Violence of Climate Change by James Dyke (2021)
• Meltdown: The Earth Without Glaciers by Jorge Daniel Taillant (2021)
• The World as We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate by Amy Brady & Tajja Isen (2022)
• Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis by Annie Proulx (2022)
• The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right by Sam Moore & Alex Roberts (2022)
• Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis by Eve Darian-Smith (2022)
• The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time: The Arctic Mission to the Epicenter of Climate Change by Markus Rex (2022)
• I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis With Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor by Andrew Boyd (2023)

my personal comments

• if you’re a pyromaniac, the path of Fire in Paradise, Paradise, Megafire, Firestorm, and The Pyrocene should satisfy that itch.
• the doomer trifecta is probably Fire and Flood, Losing Earth, and Nomad Century so if you want to know how badly we fucked this one up they go into that quite intimately
• wonks will probably enjoy Nomad Century, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, and California Burning as they deal with policy and policy prescriptions in decent droves
• people looking for something less emotionally devastating should read the optimistic chapters of The Best of Times, The Worst of Times (it is structured to alternate pessimism/optimism chapters) and Choked (which has a generally positive outlook)
• Extreme Cities is a Verso book, and so is probably the most socialist-oriented of these
• if you want to be emotionally devastated on a personal level: read the two Paradise books (ideally back-to-back) or one of them and The End of Ice