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Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
A captivating exploration of climate change that uses nine different emotions to better understand the science, history, and future of our evolving planet.
Scientist Kate Marvel has seen the world end before, sometimes several times a day. In the computer models she uses to study climate change, it’s easy to simulate rising temperatures, catastrophic outcomes, and bleak futures. But climate change isn’t just happening in those models. It’s happening here, to the only good planet in the universe. It’s happening to us. And she has feelings about that.
Human Nature is a deeply felt inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, Marvel uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. As expected, there is anger, fear, and grief — but also wonder, hope, and love. With her singular voice, Marvel takes us on a soaring journey, one filled with mythology, physics, witchcraft, bad movies, volcanoes, Roman emperors, sequoia groves, and the many small miracles of nature we usually take for granted.
Hopeful, heartbreaking, and surprisingly funny, Human Nature is a vital, wondrous exploration of how it feels to live in a changing world.
Scientist Kate Marvel has seen the world end before, sometimes several times a day. In the computer models she uses to study climate change, it’s easy to simulate rising temperatures, catastrophic outcomes, and bleak futures. But climate change isn’t just happening in those models. It’s happening here, to the only good planet in the universe. It’s happening to us. And she has feelings about that.
Human Nature is a deeply felt inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, Marvel uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. As expected, there is anger, fear, and grief — but also wonder, hope, and love. With her singular voice, Marvel takes us on a soaring journey, one filled with mythology, physics, witchcraft, bad movies, volcanoes, Roman emperors, sequoia groves, and the many small miracles of nature we usually take for granted.
Hopeful, heartbreaking, and surprisingly funny, Human Nature is a vital, wondrous exploration of how it feels to live in a changing world.
308 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 29, 2025
160 people are currently reading
7532 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews
June 23, 2025
*This was an ARC First Reads Giveaway*
I was nervous about reading this book, because I have a lot of climate anxiety, which I don't think is being talked about enough. I also don't like reading gushy hopeful books, and this is not that. As a long time climate scientist, she was very real about all the ways we are feeling, and the directions our Earth can go. This book includes great science, and most importantly, a history of the science of climate change. She acknowledges all of the factors we can and cannot control. The book is engaging to ready, funny, and most delightfully, full of rightful STEMinist rage.
I was nervous about reading this book, because I have a lot of climate anxiety, which I don't think is being talked about enough. I also don't like reading gushy hopeful books, and this is not that. As a long time climate scientist, she was very real about all the ways we are feeling, and the directions our Earth can go. This book includes great science, and most importantly, a history of the science of climate change. She acknowledges all of the factors we can and cannot control. The book is engaging to ready, funny, and most delightfully, full of rightful STEMinist rage.
July 9, 2025
Am I becoming a nature reader? If so, it goes back to Rachel Carson and The Sea Around Us. It does seem as if many of my favorite reads of the last few years have been books about the natural world. Add this one to the list! Kate Marvel's emotional soapbox, Human Nature, is everything I want in a book - and the narration is perfect. I enjoyed hearing Marvel's rants, and her wonder and delight, her personal stories and scientific explanations. This is a book about feelings. And, really, feelings are what will save us. If we are to be saved. Because logic alone is not going to turn this boat around. But if enough people catch feelings (I think that is the term kids use these days), then maybe we will find the will to make some much-needed course corrections. Marvel reminds us we have made big changes in the past, we can do so again. Thank you to the author, narrator (excellent job!), publisher, and NetGalley for the audioARC.
July 3, 2025
A bit disappointed because based on the title and the synopsis I had read, I thought this book would assume the reader already has a relatively good understanding of climate change and would focus more, as the title suggests, offering advice on how to deal with the complex emotions climate change evokes in us who lose sleep thinking about it. In fact this is not the primary focus and much of the content could have been included under any of the chapters that were titled after different emotions (anger, guilt, hope etc.) Instead it focuses more on depicting the author's own life story and relationship to nature and climate change, offering some level of relatability, but does not address or pay attention to the reader enough. But once I cast my own expectations aside, it was a decent and informative, though maybe a bit repetitive, read.
July 30, 2025
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson said this was the best climate book she'd ever read. Same here.
I love the framework, telling the story of climate change linked to various human emotions. I love how much I learned about the science of climate modeling. I love Marvel's writing, which is frequently beautiful:
"Baby sequoias born in fire are the lucky ones, phoenixes nurtured in the wreckage of the old forest, growing alongside the fire-scarred flanks of their elderly parents and hoping to quickly reach toward the sky. A little burn now and then is an immensely useful thing, clearing the clutter from the maternity ward and opening the nursery windows." p. 115
"As we become old, we accumulate layers of disaster, small and large, invisible mirrors of the fossilized death preserved under our feet. The happiest life is shot through with sadness, glimmers of unbearable grief shining cold and hard in the light like crystals of quartz in smooth granite." p. 120
"A climate model is to physics as a murmuration of starlings is to a single sitting bird. Everything is connected by a ragged weave of mathematics, isolated strands of spare truth braided into hard knots of complexity." p. 216
She also haunted me with this line:
"The most frightening thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other." p. 98
Highest possible recommendation for this book. I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.
"This is our curse: to shout, unheard, into the void. To make predictions that can't help but come true. To warn and warn and warn again until the entire world is engulfed in needless, predictable flames." p. 3
"Climate is the long-term average of weather: the background conditions in which it happens...Weather is what humans experience over our short lives. Climate is a matter for the gods." p. 18
"If policymakers truly understood the implications and moved to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, then Exxon would have to adapt to survive. On this, at least, Exxon was certain: If the choice were between changing the climate and changing its business model, the world would have to warm. We are just as sure that Exxon and its ilk lied about climate change as we are about the reality of climate change itself." p. 39
"If the wet-bulb temperature exceeds around 95 degrees F, a terrible threshold has been breached...Evaporation can no longer carry heat away from the body. Even if you are young and healthy, even if you are sitting calmly in the shade, even if you have all the drinking water you want, your body, so highly evolved to handle heat, will shut down. You did not evolve for this climate. If you go outside, you will be dead within hours." p. 89
"When a fossil fuel is combusted, it releases energy, which boils water, which turns to steam, which drives a turbine, which generates electricity. This is an almost comically inefficient process." p. 184
"Solar and wind, as well as the batteries needed to compensate for their intermittency, are getting cheaper at an astonishing rate. The price of onshore wind power plummeted 70 percent last decade, while solar costs fell by almost 90 percent." p. 185
"Almost 40 percent of Earth's ice-free land is used for farming, an area the size of Africa and South America combined. Three-quarters of this agricultural land is used for livestock, either as pasture or to grow crops for animal feed." p. 200
"Large numbers lend themselves to nihilism: They take up too much space to leave room for any meaning. They make you think that nothing really matters. But so much does." p. 212
"Water resists change. Its heat capacity is large, making it more difficult to heat and cool than land. The air over the ocean is therefore buffered from wild temperature swings, and the coastal climates over which that air moves tend to be mild as a result. Seattle has a maritime climate because the prevailing winds blow in over the ocean; the east coast of North America is colder and more continental because the winds blow away from the land toward the Atlantic. This is one of the reasons London winters are much warmer than New York City winters, despite Britain's more northern location." p. 215
"There is no such thing as 'human nature'. Anyone who says so knows very little about humans, and nothing at all about nature. We all contain, if not multitudes, at least a few squabbling contradictions." p. 227
I love the framework, telling the story of climate change linked to various human emotions. I love how much I learned about the science of climate modeling. I love Marvel's writing, which is frequently beautiful:
"Baby sequoias born in fire are the lucky ones, phoenixes nurtured in the wreckage of the old forest, growing alongside the fire-scarred flanks of their elderly parents and hoping to quickly reach toward the sky. A little burn now and then is an immensely useful thing, clearing the clutter from the maternity ward and opening the nursery windows." p. 115
"As we become old, we accumulate layers of disaster, small and large, invisible mirrors of the fossilized death preserved under our feet. The happiest life is shot through with sadness, glimmers of unbearable grief shining cold and hard in the light like crystals of quartz in smooth granite." p. 120
"A climate model is to physics as a murmuration of starlings is to a single sitting bird. Everything is connected by a ragged weave of mathematics, isolated strands of spare truth braided into hard knots of complexity." p. 216
She also haunted me with this line:
"The most frightening thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other." p. 98
Highest possible recommendation for this book. I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.
"This is our curse: to shout, unheard, into the void. To make predictions that can't help but come true. To warn and warn and warn again until the entire world is engulfed in needless, predictable flames." p. 3
"Climate is the long-term average of weather: the background conditions in which it happens...Weather is what humans experience over our short lives. Climate is a matter for the gods." p. 18
"If policymakers truly understood the implications and moved to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, then Exxon would have to adapt to survive. On this, at least, Exxon was certain: If the choice were between changing the climate and changing its business model, the world would have to warm. We are just as sure that Exxon and its ilk lied about climate change as we are about the reality of climate change itself." p. 39
"If the wet-bulb temperature exceeds around 95 degrees F, a terrible threshold has been breached...Evaporation can no longer carry heat away from the body. Even if you are young and healthy, even if you are sitting calmly in the shade, even if you have all the drinking water you want, your body, so highly evolved to handle heat, will shut down. You did not evolve for this climate. If you go outside, you will be dead within hours." p. 89
"When a fossil fuel is combusted, it releases energy, which boils water, which turns to steam, which drives a turbine, which generates electricity. This is an almost comically inefficient process." p. 184
"Solar and wind, as well as the batteries needed to compensate for their intermittency, are getting cheaper at an astonishing rate. The price of onshore wind power plummeted 70 percent last decade, while solar costs fell by almost 90 percent." p. 185
"Almost 40 percent of Earth's ice-free land is used for farming, an area the size of Africa and South America combined. Three-quarters of this agricultural land is used for livestock, either as pasture or to grow crops for animal feed." p. 200
"Large numbers lend themselves to nihilism: They take up too much space to leave room for any meaning. They make you think that nothing really matters. But so much does." p. 212
"Water resists change. Its heat capacity is large, making it more difficult to heat and cool than land. The air over the ocean is therefore buffered from wild temperature swings, and the coastal climates over which that air moves tend to be mild as a result. Seattle has a maritime climate because the prevailing winds blow in over the ocean; the east coast of North America is colder and more continental because the winds blow away from the land toward the Atlantic. This is one of the reasons London winters are much warmer than New York City winters, despite Britain's more northern location." p. 215
"There is no such thing as 'human nature'. Anyone who says so knows very little about humans, and nothing at all about nature. We all contain, if not multitudes, at least a few squabbling contradictions." p. 227
January 6, 2026
Decent read!
A fun book about (mostly) the perils of climate change and some ideas on what we can do to at least hinder it. It also outlined how fickle the climate system we have on this planet is and while solutions are easy to speculate it is way more nuanced than some climate activists/denialists would have you believe. Of course the author isn’t saying that climate change deniers are right in any sense whatsoever.
This book reminded me of why I’m glad I don’t have kids. While I love humanity I don’t think its stubbornness can outpace the consequences of our actions.
The author ends the book with a chapter about her mysterious illness and reflects on mortality. Was a beautiful ending and I wish her the best.
A fun book about (mostly) the perils of climate change and some ideas on what we can do to at least hinder it. It also outlined how fickle the climate system we have on this planet is and while solutions are easy to speculate it is way more nuanced than some climate activists/denialists would have you believe. Of course the author isn’t saying that climate change deniers are right in any sense whatsoever.
This book reminded me of why I’m glad I don’t have kids. While I love humanity I don’t think its stubbornness can outpace the consequences of our actions.
The author ends the book with a chapter about her mysterious illness and reflects on mortality. Was a beautiful ending and I wish her the best.
September 15, 2025
One of the most inviting, captivating and endearing updates on our climate crisis - and our responses to it - as you'll ever find. Should be read everywhere and by as many people as possible. It's not over yet!
August 6, 2025
An articulate description of the history and science of climate change. I thought Marvel would expound more on our various emotional reactions to various crises through time (as advertised in the book's title), but the telling was more factual. Gloomy, sad, and hopeful, all at once.
January 17, 2026
This book was so good. I would really highly recommend it to anyone (who does not study climate science—it would be repetitive to you if so) who has had any sort of feelings about climate change or wants to learn more.
Marvel writes with beautiful prose that’s also well researched and well explained for an audience of laypeople.
I feel like I’m coming out of this book with a much broader understanding of the history of climate science and a better understanding of the ways that processes on Earth are tied to each other.
Marvel writes with beautiful prose that’s also well researched and well explained for an audience of laypeople.
I feel like I’m coming out of this book with a much broader understanding of the history of climate science and a better understanding of the ways that processes on Earth are tied to each other.
January 24, 2026
Een confronterend schoon pleidooi tegen egoïsme, een introductie tot klimaatwetenschap, een must-read.
January 16, 2026
This is probably the best book I have read on climate change for the lay person. The author makes a good connection to the reader. The side stories into history, mythology, literature hit home.
August 13, 2025
Hands down one of the best books I’ve read about climate change, and perhaps one of the best nonfiction science books, too. Marvel more than lives up to her name — you will find plenty in this book to marvel at. Her writing is poignant, sharp, and riotously funny, often in the same chapter. If more climate scientists could communicate this well, I doubt we’d still be in a crisis. I’m confident this will be a top recommendation of mine for many years to come.
October 3, 2025
Pre-Read Notes
That last paragraph sounds like such an interesting spin on a book, especially a non-fiction one. I'm seldom intrigued by the lackluster descriptions books often give, but this one piqued my interest.
I don't particularly care to read about climate change (although needless to say it is a very important topic and I would like to care/learn more, hence why I even checked out this book to begin with. It just has to be written in an enjoyable manner which I imagine isn't often the case). So I'm glad this book seemingly takes a unique approach to the topic. Which makes it more appealing to a wider audience.
I'll be sure to give a review soon.
__________________________________________
Review
DNF: 38% in and I realized I spent far too much time on this audiobook thinking it would somehow improve or I'd dislike it less.
The narrator is SOOO ill fitting for the way this book is written. She sounds so sterile and unenthused (and this is significantly more pronounced when listening at greater than 1x speed).
It sounds like an army instructor constantly drilling you on the 20 things you did wrong. And not in relation to her writing, but strictly in her delivery, and tone of voice. What makes this even worse is that she specifically chose a narrative approach for this (nonfiction) book (which is interesting and it's very nice to see a different approach being taken).
So unlike many other nonfiction books, this was meant to feel more like a story you could just casually (at least more casually than if it was purely just a dump of information on climate change) enjoy.
But the thing is the narrators voice didn't at all convey that playful, casual and relaxed tone that the writing style was more geared towards. It was so dry and incredibly authoritative therefore it completely clashed with the writing style. On the surface it definitely seems like she did her best to read this with some energy and emotion.
But the undertone of her voice absolutely SCREAMS someone who is VERY authoritative, disciplinary, rigid and strict. It's inescapable and ever present throughout the narration.
As my pre-read notes indicated, I was very happy an optimistic to give this a listen. But it didn't satisfy.
And again, the approach (and writing style) to this book seem really cool and unique, but I couldn't bare the incredibly misaligned voice/delivery of the narration.
Of course the physical copy will be completely devoid of that major shortcoming so I imagine it may be a much more enjoyable experience for readers.
That last paragraph sounds like such an interesting spin on a book, especially a non-fiction one. I'm seldom intrigued by the lackluster descriptions books often give, but this one piqued my interest.
I don't particularly care to read about climate change (although needless to say it is a very important topic and I would like to care/learn more, hence why I even checked out this book to begin with. It just has to be written in an enjoyable manner which I imagine isn't often the case). So I'm glad this book seemingly takes a unique approach to the topic. Which makes it more appealing to a wider audience.
I'll be sure to give a review soon.
__________________________________________
Review
DNF: 38% in and I realized I spent far too much time on this audiobook thinking it would somehow improve or I'd dislike it less.
The narrator is SOOO ill fitting for the way this book is written. She sounds so sterile and unenthused (and this is significantly more pronounced when listening at greater than 1x speed).
It sounds like an army instructor constantly drilling you on the 20 things you did wrong. And not in relation to her writing, but strictly in her delivery, and tone of voice. What makes this even worse is that she specifically chose a narrative approach for this (nonfiction) book (which is interesting and it's very nice to see a different approach being taken).
So unlike many other nonfiction books, this was meant to feel more like a story you could just casually (at least more casually than if it was purely just a dump of information on climate change) enjoy.
But the thing is the narrators voice didn't at all convey that playful, casual and relaxed tone that the writing style was more geared towards. It was so dry and incredibly authoritative therefore it completely clashed with the writing style. On the surface it definitely seems like she did her best to read this with some energy and emotion.
But the undertone of her voice absolutely SCREAMS someone who is VERY authoritative, disciplinary, rigid and strict. It's inescapable and ever present throughout the narration.
As my pre-read notes indicated, I was very happy an optimistic to give this a listen. But it didn't satisfy.
And again, the approach (and writing style) to this book seem really cool and unique, but I couldn't bare the incredibly misaligned voice/delivery of the narration.
Of course the physical copy will be completely devoid of that major shortcoming so I imagine it may be a much more enjoyable experience for readers.
October 7, 2025
I really liked the framing around emotions.
Reading about climate change can be stressful but the framing around emotions allowed me to have a bit of a warning for each chapter.
The anger chapter was cathartic and the surprise chapter made me LOL multiple times.
The only thing I felt was missing was more info and simplifications around the climate modeling that is the author’s expertise. The overall book was very broad and I think I prefer climate books that have a more pointed focus.
Also—just to avoid a jump
Scare—there is a random HP reference that was completely unnecessary.
Overall an interesting read. Most of the literary and film references enhanced the book.
Reading about climate change can be stressful but the framing around emotions allowed me to have a bit of a warning for each chapter.
The anger chapter was cathartic and the surprise chapter made me LOL multiple times.
The only thing I felt was missing was more info and simplifications around the climate modeling that is the author’s expertise. The overall book was very broad and I think I prefer climate books that have a more pointed focus.
Also—just to avoid a jump
Scare—there is a random HP reference that was completely unnecessary.
Overall an interesting read. Most of the literary and film references enhanced the book.
Read
August 31, 2025if you know anything about the science of climate change, I think you can skip this. If you have read a recent book of nature writing that discusses loss, i think you can also skip this. it would have been much more successful as nature writing or personal essay. instead, it's personal anecdotes interspersed with relatively basic climate science & historical facts presented in a way that suits the narrative at hand. (the narrative being x person was bad, x person was good, all people are human). Not bad, but not substantive in the way that the topic requires.
June 26, 2025
Written by a scientist, Human Nature: Nine Ways To Feel About Our Changing Planet, dives into climate change. Using climate models and science to explain what the causes behind climate changes are, Marvel shows just how important and relevant this topic is. A good mixture of history, why we cannot exactly predict the future and ways to decrease carbon output, I found I learned a lot!
Paired with different emotions, we are guided through the science and Marvel states a good argument for why we should all care and how we need to take action now, for a better future for our children.
The book isn’t all doom and gloom. I appreciate her hope at the end. A good read for those that want to better understand the science behind climate change.
Thank you Ecco books for the physical copy in exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley and Harper Audio for the audiobook in exchange for an honest review.
Paired with different emotions, we are guided through the science and Marvel states a good argument for why we should all care and how we need to take action now, for a better future for our children.
The book isn’t all doom and gloom. I appreciate her hope at the end. A good read for those that want to better understand the science behind climate change.
Thank you Ecco books for the physical copy in exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley and Harper Audio for the audiobook in exchange for an honest review.
August 11, 2025
Pretty good! I enjoyed Kate Marvel's writing about as much as I do her science. I think the "Nine Ways to Feel" subtitle made me think this was going to be something a little different from what it actually was, but it definitely succeeded at being the thing it actually aimed to be. Surprisingly heavy ending that I did not see coming. Would recommend.
December 7, 2025
Really great science writing and a delight to read. It’s hard to feel optimistic about a problem that requires everyone on earth to work towards a common good, but the author provides reasons for hope and love.
July 5, 2025
Amazing.
I took off a star because of the Harry Potter reference and that transphobic mess.
I took off a star because of the Harry Potter reference and that transphobic mess.
August 30, 2025
This was a fascinating read. I enjoyed learning about different aspects of climate change and how our climate is constantly changing due to a variety of factors.
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January 5, 2026
This is a wonderful book that explores climate change through nine core human emotions — wonder, anger, guilt, fear, grief, surprise, pride, hope, and love.
I enjoyed Kate Marvel’s writing style and narrative framework. I loved the descriptions of Greek mythology that are immediately followed by concise explanations of contemporary climate science ideas. This is executed beautifully. I also loved the use of historical events and references that were directly or indirectly influenced by changes to the weather and climate. For example, Ghengis Khan’s rise to power being affected by the abundance of grass and available food supplies to support large-scale militaristic endeavors.
I recommend this for anyone wanting to learn more about our changing climate and the various emotions that we might experience in relation to this. I would recommend other books for anyone wanting to learn the technical details of our changing climate, or specific actions we can take as individuals to enact positive change in the world.
••••
“Climate models run on this magic. We build our little worlds from many equations, layering complex structure on top of solid foundations. We start with a star and a rock. Then we make an atmosphere, a tall column of sky in which air may rise and rain can fall. We expand that sky in every direction to give the winds a place to blow. We dig deep pits below and fill them with salt water to understand the ocean currents. Somehow, from a mess of math and code, we find something beautiful and true. We call it a climate model.” — Page 4
“Here, then, is a simple model for a living planet: Take one ordinary star. Add a small rock ninety-four million miles away. If the rock is too cold, add a sky. Then watch as the magic happens. The sun shines, the planet tries to return its borrowed light to space, and little dancing gases in the atmosphere play a constant game of catch and release, throwing some of the outgoing light back down to its surface. The temperature rises and stabilizes, the rock swings round its mediocre little star, and all the stories on Earth begin...” — Pages 7-8
“Physics is often described as cold, clinical, and boring, the antithesis of a good story. And the simple cautionary tale of Icarus does indeed fall apart when confronted by reality. But I think there’s something wonderful in knowing how the world works, in understanding that when the sky cools with height, it forms clouds and makes rain. Physics, and the climate models based on it, tell the truth, rich and complex and full of life. Reality is a beautiful canvas for telling stories; I prefer it to any myth. It seems a fair exchange to me: lose one neat cautionary tale, gain a whole world of new possibilities, better futures, happier endings.” — Page 10
“The climate models I use every day tell me why the world is the way it is. They tell me that the planet is spherical, watery, and turning. It’s heated by the sun. Air rises from the warm, moist tropics and sinks in the desert subtropics. In sinking, it presses down hard on the surface, forcing the air below to move toward areas of lower pressure. The world turns beneath the moving air, which is deflected into trade winds. The winds move over the sea surface, shoving the water along at the boundary between ocean and sky. The water obeys, but recalcitrantly, slowed by its own choppy roughness and bent at an angle by the spinning world. The ocean layers below the surface are dragged by the moving current above. Water rains into the ocean and evaporates back to the sky. These are the foundations. You can always add more and more complexity, building the model up further. Add swirling confrontations between stray warm air just up from the tropics and cold air dripping down from the poles. Now add the boundaries of continents. Now add mountains. Now add forests that exhale great breaths of cloud. Now add cities, cars, factories. Now add yourself. The rules, shaped for so long only by physics, are changing now. There are new characters in the story, entities not describable by the laws of physics but still subject to their consequences. They are tiny but powerful, capable of changing the very sky under which they live. These characters can think and feel and read. They are us.” — Page 19
“The world is much older than we are, and long ago the sun shone on a planet every bit as alive as it is now. The plants made sugar from sunlight, the animals made dinner from plants, and everyone died in the end with the remnants of their last meals stored inside them. Some became fossils, which we now make into fuels. When humans exhume these ancient corpses and set them on fire, this frees the last vestiges of primordial sunlight. Bodies trapped in deep Earth are transfigured to light and heat and motion and an invisible miasma of carbon dioxide. We humans have done wonderful and terrible things with the trapped energy of the long-ago sun. We build gleaming cities and humming machines. We live longer and more comfortably, and we also kill each other more efficiently and in greater numbers. All the while, the color-less, odorless residues of all this activity linger in our sky.” — Page 21
“Scientists are supposed to be circumspect with their emotions, to work toward a kind of detached objectivity that allows us to float above feelings, biases, and politics into a more elevated rational plane. But I don’t think that we enhance our credibility by pretending we feel nothing when we are ignored or belittled or insulted. It hardly makes us more honest to lie about our emotions. So here it is: I’m mad. I am angry at the cynicism, the lies, and the greed. I feel burning rage when I hear the same tired talking points, the falsehoods repeated credulously by people who should (and do) know better. I’m annoyed at how I and my fellow scientists have been treated. And I am absolutely furious when I see the uncertainty inherent in the scientific method twisted into something evil. Scientists don’t know everything, it’s true. But my God, I want to scream, we don’t know nothing.” — Page 26
“The Sahara became a desert because of a tiny change in Earth’s orbit. Right now the planet is closest to the sun in January. Most of us don’t seem to notice; seasons, after all, are caused by the tilt of Earth’s axis, not by our distance from the sun. But ten thousand years ago, the planet was closest to the sun in June. And this made the north of Africa a little sunnier and warmer than it is now. The warmer surface drew in moist air from the colder Atlantic, which condensed into torrential rains. Every year, for thousands of years, there was a summer monsoon in northern Africa. And then it stopped. The planet wobbled in its orbit, the rains began to decline and fail, and the lakes and grasses, the animals and the people, vanished into the dust. It left behind a desert that covers 8 percent of the land on the globe…” — Page 57
“… The rich make choices, while the poor feel the consequences. The people suffering the most from climate change are those least guilty of causing it.” — Pages 68-69
“… The statistics are staggering. To cite the 2023 U.S. National Climate Assessment, in the 1980s there was one (inflation-adjusted) billion-dollar disaster in the United States every four months. Now there is one every three weeks.” — Page 74
“Whether a downpour turns into a flood depends largely on the ground where it falls. Heavy rainfall on pavement and asphalt lands differently than on parkland or beaches. Predictably, the places better protected by green space tend to be wealthier and whiter. Hurricane Harvey’s waters disproportionately flooded Spanish-speaking households in Houston, not because rainfall discriminates, but because the country does.” — Page 81
“At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the central Asian steppe was a harsh place to live. Natural variability in the climate system had led to a devastating drought in the late twelfth century. And as had happened many times before, these adverse conditions had resulted in political instability. The ensuing social chaos empowered a strongman, exactly as it had in Rome a millennium before. The warring factions of Mongolia coalesced around a brilliant military leader named Temüjin. In 1206, he formally adopted a new name: Genghis Khan. Having united the Mongols, he turned his attention to the world beyond the steppe. And then, again through the randomness of natural variability, the local climate changed. The period between 1211 and 1225 CE was the wettest period on record in Mongolia. It was also fairly warm, and in these favorable conditions grass grew abundantly. Suddenly there was enough food to feed an army. Genghis Khan’s horde began to move, conquering neighboring states with astonishing rapidity. By 1227, the Mongol empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to the east coast of China, from Siberia to Tibet. After the Khan’s death, his successors carried on the family business of slaughter and conquest. The Mongols were amazingly skilled horsemen led by brilliant generals. But their greatest weapon was fear. Rumors spread: roads lined with skulls, cities ablaze, massacres of men, women, children, even dogs and cats. Many cities, knowing even the slightest act of resistance might provoke destruction, simply surrendered to the oncoming hordes. Still, between twenty and fifty million people died in the conflict. Nobody saw it coming. A small change in the climate, a short period of abundance in the central Asian steppe, and within a few years the world became unrecognizable…” — Page 95
“… So yes, I’m scared of what climate change will bring: the floods and droughts, the unbearable heat, the strengthening storms. But what scares me the most isn’t the rising seas or the extreme weather. The most frightening thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other.” — Page 98
“There are certain feedback processes that we understand very well. It’s no surprise that ice melts in the heat; a warmer planet is very obviously a less icy one. When ice melts, it reveals darker ground or water underneath, which absorbs more of the sun’s energy, which makes it even warmer. This is an example of a destabilizing feedback. It’s one all climate models (and all scientists) agree on: It gets warmer, ice melts, it gets warmer still. There are other known feedback loops. For example, hot air is known to hold more water vapor, which itself is a greenhouse gas that traps more heat from the planet below: another destabilizing feedback. As the planet’s temperature increases, it loses more energy to space: a stabilizing feedback. All of these things follow from very basic physics; there’s really no argument about how these feedbacks work. But there is one feedback loop that still mystifies scientists, one process that explains most of the uncertainty in climate sensitivity: clouds.” — Pages 134-135
“We don’t know how bad climate change will get, because we don’t know how much carbon dioxide there’s going to be. And this is because we have no idea what the living world has in store for us. Plants thrive on carbon dioxide, and more of it in the atmosphere might mean more plants grow, sequestering more carbon in their leaves and stalks and soil. On the other hand, CO2 makes the planet warmer and, in many cases, more flammable. Trees that die in the heat or burn in wildfires lose their ability to take carbon out of the atmosphere. At the same time, carbon dioxide does not dissolve as well in warming ocean waters, meaning that more of it could accumulate in the atmosphere as the planet heats up. And as permafrost thaws, additional methane and carbon will be released into the atmosphere…” — Pages 140-141
“… So, like all methods of carbon removal, enhanced rock weathering has the potential to help, if deployed correctly. And, like all carbon removal methods, it also has the potential to do enormous harm. No one has yet demonstrated the potential of direct air capture, marine carbon removal, enhanced rock weathering, or any other method at large scales, and there are many things that could derail the technology — scientific considerations not yet understood, technological difficulties, political opposition, economic constraints. Still, science is powerful and creative, humans have a long history of innovating our way out of trouble, and in the deepening climate crisis more and more brilliant people are turning their attention to the problem of carbon removal. Miracles are possible. But it’s a terrible strategy to bet the planet on one.” — Page 176
“I’ve been trained to see some of the invisible forces that underlie this spectacle. I understand the mathematics that describes the seasons and tides, how the warming Earth might heat the ocean and fill the rivers with snowmelt earlier in the spring. The fish and the animals and people who depend on them are linked together by something deep and universal. All of us obey the same laws, whether we know them or not. We are held together in a magnificent prison made by the laws of physics. When the sun shines, we warm. When gravity pulls, we have no choice but to fall. We resist only with more physics, redirecting energy and momentum and mass to other uses, borrowing it for a brief moment from the rest of the universe.” — Page 224
I enjoyed Kate Marvel’s writing style and narrative framework. I loved the descriptions of Greek mythology that are immediately followed by concise explanations of contemporary climate science ideas. This is executed beautifully. I also loved the use of historical events and references that were directly or indirectly influenced by changes to the weather and climate. For example, Ghengis Khan’s rise to power being affected by the abundance of grass and available food supplies to support large-scale militaristic endeavors.
I recommend this for anyone wanting to learn more about our changing climate and the various emotions that we might experience in relation to this. I would recommend other books for anyone wanting to learn the technical details of our changing climate, or specific actions we can take as individuals to enact positive change in the world.
••••
“Climate models run on this magic. We build our little worlds from many equations, layering complex structure on top of solid foundations. We start with a star and a rock. Then we make an atmosphere, a tall column of sky in which air may rise and rain can fall. We expand that sky in every direction to give the winds a place to blow. We dig deep pits below and fill them with salt water to understand the ocean currents. Somehow, from a mess of math and code, we find something beautiful and true. We call it a climate model.” — Page 4
“Here, then, is a simple model for a living planet: Take one ordinary star. Add a small rock ninety-four million miles away. If the rock is too cold, add a sky. Then watch as the magic happens. The sun shines, the planet tries to return its borrowed light to space, and little dancing gases in the atmosphere play a constant game of catch and release, throwing some of the outgoing light back down to its surface. The temperature rises and stabilizes, the rock swings round its mediocre little star, and all the stories on Earth begin...” — Pages 7-8
“Physics is often described as cold, clinical, and boring, the antithesis of a good story. And the simple cautionary tale of Icarus does indeed fall apart when confronted by reality. But I think there’s something wonderful in knowing how the world works, in understanding that when the sky cools with height, it forms clouds and makes rain. Physics, and the climate models based on it, tell the truth, rich and complex and full of life. Reality is a beautiful canvas for telling stories; I prefer it to any myth. It seems a fair exchange to me: lose one neat cautionary tale, gain a whole world of new possibilities, better futures, happier endings.” — Page 10
“The climate models I use every day tell me why the world is the way it is. They tell me that the planet is spherical, watery, and turning. It’s heated by the sun. Air rises from the warm, moist tropics and sinks in the desert subtropics. In sinking, it presses down hard on the surface, forcing the air below to move toward areas of lower pressure. The world turns beneath the moving air, which is deflected into trade winds. The winds move over the sea surface, shoving the water along at the boundary between ocean and sky. The water obeys, but recalcitrantly, slowed by its own choppy roughness and bent at an angle by the spinning world. The ocean layers below the surface are dragged by the moving current above. Water rains into the ocean and evaporates back to the sky. These are the foundations. You can always add more and more complexity, building the model up further. Add swirling confrontations between stray warm air just up from the tropics and cold air dripping down from the poles. Now add the boundaries of continents. Now add mountains. Now add forests that exhale great breaths of cloud. Now add cities, cars, factories. Now add yourself. The rules, shaped for so long only by physics, are changing now. There are new characters in the story, entities not describable by the laws of physics but still subject to their consequences. They are tiny but powerful, capable of changing the very sky under which they live. These characters can think and feel and read. They are us.” — Page 19
“The world is much older than we are, and long ago the sun shone on a planet every bit as alive as it is now. The plants made sugar from sunlight, the animals made dinner from plants, and everyone died in the end with the remnants of their last meals stored inside them. Some became fossils, which we now make into fuels. When humans exhume these ancient corpses and set them on fire, this frees the last vestiges of primordial sunlight. Bodies trapped in deep Earth are transfigured to light and heat and motion and an invisible miasma of carbon dioxide. We humans have done wonderful and terrible things with the trapped energy of the long-ago sun. We build gleaming cities and humming machines. We live longer and more comfortably, and we also kill each other more efficiently and in greater numbers. All the while, the color-less, odorless residues of all this activity linger in our sky.” — Page 21
“Scientists are supposed to be circumspect with their emotions, to work toward a kind of detached objectivity that allows us to float above feelings, biases, and politics into a more elevated rational plane. But I don’t think that we enhance our credibility by pretending we feel nothing when we are ignored or belittled or insulted. It hardly makes us more honest to lie about our emotions. So here it is: I’m mad. I am angry at the cynicism, the lies, and the greed. I feel burning rage when I hear the same tired talking points, the falsehoods repeated credulously by people who should (and do) know better. I’m annoyed at how I and my fellow scientists have been treated. And I am absolutely furious when I see the uncertainty inherent in the scientific method twisted into something evil. Scientists don’t know everything, it’s true. But my God, I want to scream, we don’t know nothing.” — Page 26
“The Sahara became a desert because of a tiny change in Earth’s orbit. Right now the planet is closest to the sun in January. Most of us don’t seem to notice; seasons, after all, are caused by the tilt of Earth’s axis, not by our distance from the sun. But ten thousand years ago, the planet was closest to the sun in June. And this made the north of Africa a little sunnier and warmer than it is now. The warmer surface drew in moist air from the colder Atlantic, which condensed into torrential rains. Every year, for thousands of years, there was a summer monsoon in northern Africa. And then it stopped. The planet wobbled in its orbit, the rains began to decline and fail, and the lakes and grasses, the animals and the people, vanished into the dust. It left behind a desert that covers 8 percent of the land on the globe…” — Page 57
“… The rich make choices, while the poor feel the consequences. The people suffering the most from climate change are those least guilty of causing it.” — Pages 68-69
“… The statistics are staggering. To cite the 2023 U.S. National Climate Assessment, in the 1980s there was one (inflation-adjusted) billion-dollar disaster in the United States every four months. Now there is one every three weeks.” — Page 74
“Whether a downpour turns into a flood depends largely on the ground where it falls. Heavy rainfall on pavement and asphalt lands differently than on parkland or beaches. Predictably, the places better protected by green space tend to be wealthier and whiter. Hurricane Harvey’s waters disproportionately flooded Spanish-speaking households in Houston, not because rainfall discriminates, but because the country does.” — Page 81
“At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the central Asian steppe was a harsh place to live. Natural variability in the climate system had led to a devastating drought in the late twelfth century. And as had happened many times before, these adverse conditions had resulted in political instability. The ensuing social chaos empowered a strongman, exactly as it had in Rome a millennium before. The warring factions of Mongolia coalesced around a brilliant military leader named Temüjin. In 1206, he formally adopted a new name: Genghis Khan. Having united the Mongols, he turned his attention to the world beyond the steppe. And then, again through the randomness of natural variability, the local climate changed. The period between 1211 and 1225 CE was the wettest period on record in Mongolia. It was also fairly warm, and in these favorable conditions grass grew abundantly. Suddenly there was enough food to feed an army. Genghis Khan’s horde began to move, conquering neighboring states with astonishing rapidity. By 1227, the Mongol empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to the east coast of China, from Siberia to Tibet. After the Khan’s death, his successors carried on the family business of slaughter and conquest. The Mongols were amazingly skilled horsemen led by brilliant generals. But their greatest weapon was fear. Rumors spread: roads lined with skulls, cities ablaze, massacres of men, women, children, even dogs and cats. Many cities, knowing even the slightest act of resistance might provoke destruction, simply surrendered to the oncoming hordes. Still, between twenty and fifty million people died in the conflict. Nobody saw it coming. A small change in the climate, a short period of abundance in the central Asian steppe, and within a few years the world became unrecognizable…” — Page 95
“… So yes, I’m scared of what climate change will bring: the floods and droughts, the unbearable heat, the strengthening storms. But what scares me the most isn’t the rising seas or the extreme weather. The most frightening thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other.” — Page 98
“There are certain feedback processes that we understand very well. It’s no surprise that ice melts in the heat; a warmer planet is very obviously a less icy one. When ice melts, it reveals darker ground or water underneath, which absorbs more of the sun’s energy, which makes it even warmer. This is an example of a destabilizing feedback. It’s one all climate models (and all scientists) agree on: It gets warmer, ice melts, it gets warmer still. There are other known feedback loops. For example, hot air is known to hold more water vapor, which itself is a greenhouse gas that traps more heat from the planet below: another destabilizing feedback. As the planet’s temperature increases, it loses more energy to space: a stabilizing feedback. All of these things follow from very basic physics; there’s really no argument about how these feedbacks work. But there is one feedback loop that still mystifies scientists, one process that explains most of the uncertainty in climate sensitivity: clouds.” — Pages 134-135
“We don’t know how bad climate change will get, because we don’t know how much carbon dioxide there’s going to be. And this is because we have no idea what the living world has in store for us. Plants thrive on carbon dioxide, and more of it in the atmosphere might mean more plants grow, sequestering more carbon in their leaves and stalks and soil. On the other hand, CO2 makes the planet warmer and, in many cases, more flammable. Trees that die in the heat or burn in wildfires lose their ability to take carbon out of the atmosphere. At the same time, carbon dioxide does not dissolve as well in warming ocean waters, meaning that more of it could accumulate in the atmosphere as the planet heats up. And as permafrost thaws, additional methane and carbon will be released into the atmosphere…” — Pages 140-141
“… So, like all methods of carbon removal, enhanced rock weathering has the potential to help, if deployed correctly. And, like all carbon removal methods, it also has the potential to do enormous harm. No one has yet demonstrated the potential of direct air capture, marine carbon removal, enhanced rock weathering, or any other method at large scales, and there are many things that could derail the technology — scientific considerations not yet understood, technological difficulties, political opposition, economic constraints. Still, science is powerful and creative, humans have a long history of innovating our way out of trouble, and in the deepening climate crisis more and more brilliant people are turning their attention to the problem of carbon removal. Miracles are possible. But it’s a terrible strategy to bet the planet on one.” — Page 176
“I’ve been trained to see some of the invisible forces that underlie this spectacle. I understand the mathematics that describes the seasons and tides, how the warming Earth might heat the ocean and fill the rivers with snowmelt earlier in the spring. The fish and the animals and people who depend on them are linked together by something deep and universal. All of us obey the same laws, whether we know them or not. We are held together in a magnificent prison made by the laws of physics. When the sun shines, we warm. When gravity pulls, we have no choice but to fall. We resist only with more physics, redirecting energy and momentum and mass to other uses, borrowing it for a brief moment from the rest of the universe.” — Page 224
September 7, 2025
I’m proud and surprised and hopeful and utterly in love with our beautiful world. I feel so much. Isn’t this unscientific? Aren’t researchers supposed to be perfectly objective, unemotional, and neutral about the world we study? I can’t be. I need to declare a conflict of interest regarding Earth: Everyone I love lives here. But I do worry that by saying this, I’ll leave myself vulnerable to attack, maybe even undermine climate science more broadly. I can imagine plenty of bad actors claiming that my humanity clouds my judgment.
I’m also aware that I live in a culture that has words for emotional women, none of which are compliments. Still, I am a scientist at heart, which means I always want more data. I haven’t been trained to ignore things this important. So I think we should be as honest about observing and documenting our emotions as we are about measuring rainfall or soil moisture. Pretending we feel nothing about our changing world doesn’t make us objective. It makes us liars.
One of the best climate books I have ever read! Marvel is a great storyteller, and infuses so much energy and joy and intelligence into the subject, it helps my climate anxiety a teensy bit. I just read, in The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary McBride, a definition of emotions as being evolution’s gift to navigate the world, so I am all in on showing your emotions and mixing them in with the science, it makes it so much more genuine and real. I can’t believe we are in a time where the old white people in power are continuing to deny climate change and trying to mine coal again, I really am flabbergasted, astonished in a bad way, and furious. I have to reframe it as what will hopefully be the last gasp of their time in power, the last gasp of climate deniers, even though it may cause so many damage and last until I am gone, and I live in hope that I am wrong, that reality will become real for them earlier than that.
No matter what the scientists seem to say, it may need to get worse, and children of today may have to grow up in a terrible atmosphere with dirty water, plastics in their blood, and no green anymore from living things to see what the scientists are talking about, and maybe then things will change. I just don’t know how else to reach them. This book will not. But it is good for those of us in reality.
I’m an Earth scientist, and I study the planet using climate models made from equations and code. On these digital worlds, I can set off volcanoes, take away the wind, and make the world spin backward. I can blot out the sun at will. I can change the chemistry of the atmosphere with a few keystrokes. I can imagine people living in these worlds. Every day, I do terrible things to them. No one cares at all. None of it is real.
It’s impossible to feel sad or angry or frightened about things that happen to an Earth that exists only on a hard drive. But these fake planets are the best way we have of understanding the real one, both as it is now and how it will be. Scientists have used climate models for decades to see possible futures. Now these long-predicted changes are coming to pass. It’s not just the digital atmosphere that’s full of greenhouse gases; it’s our atmosphere. It’s not a toy planet burning; it’s our beloved Earth. Climate change isn’t just happening to ones and zeros encoded on electronic switches. It’s happening here. It’s happening to me—to us. And believe me, I have feelings about that.
Our curse is also our gift. The models we use to predict danger and doom also show us amazement and beauty and joy. It’s a wonderful thing to watch the future unfold before you, to filter the world through elegant equations until it gives you something that looks an awful lot like prophecy. But to understand the future of the planet, you must understand its present: the hot tropics and freezing poles, the climb of wet air over a damp mountainside, the gentle breeze blowing in from the sea on a hot day. You must sit there for a while, waiting for the world to show you its beautiful and terrible secrets, listening to the now for the faint echoes of futures to come. The gravity that pulls the tired autumn leaves to the ground is the same force that hurls the world around the sun, the motion of every falling leaf a hard promise that spring will come again. It is a gift to be alive, to be able to notice things. We scientists are among the luckiest creatures on Earth; we are allowed to know.
Now we know the sun is just a star, one of a hundred billion in the Milky Way, itself an unexceptional galaxy among a hundred billion others. It rises not because a dazzling man drives a golden chariot across the sky but because every twenty-four hours Earth turns on its axis and shows its darkened face to the light. We know the planet is angled on that axis, and as it moves around the sun, winter will come to the tilted-away half. It’s all predictable and ordinary, dictated by rigid laws. But even this regimented order has space for strange and wonderful things. Our sun is only medium-sized, as stars go, but big enough to shine. Inside its inner core the temperature is so high that the ordinary rules of physics cease to apply and tiny charged particles that should repel one another are instead smashed together. This is the miraculous process of nuclear fusion. The sun is in the constant alchemical business of changing stuff to light, matter to pure and shining energy. We’re lucky that this is the way nature has arranged to sustain our world. If the sun were fueled by coal, it would have burned itself out long ago.
We’re lucky to live in a very particular “Goldilocks” zone the perfect distance from our star. But even this fortunate location is not enough to make our planet livable. Based on its distance from the sun, the average temperature of Earth should be around -18°C (0°F). Too cold, in short, for life to exist. Clearly, the planet is warmer than this. To understand why, we need to know three things. First, the sun shines, but so do we. Physics says that everything with a temperature—which is to say, everything—radiates its own light out to the world. Hot objects emit far more than cold ones do, but everything everywhere has no choice but to shine. You yourself are doing so right now, incandescent with the power of a 100-watt bulb. The planet on which you live is radiating, too, receiving the sun’s intense light, warming in response, and shedding its borrowed energy back into space. Second, the planet shines differently than the sun. This is because how something radiates depends on its temperature. A heated object gives off different kinds of light as it warms up, turning red, orange, blue, and then white-hot like the sun, a blazing mix of all the colors. Our eyes have evolved to see the stuff our sun gives us, which we imaginatively call visible light.
This is the third thing to know: We exist only because the sky does. A tiny fraction of our atmosphere consists of molecules that absorb infrared light. These are the naturally occurring greenhouse gases: water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. They capture Earth’s outgoing light because they can dance. When these molecules are hit by outgoing infrared radiation, the bonds that hold their atoms together start to vibrate, turning light energy into motion.
Eventually, the dance stops and the light is spat back out in every direction. These greenhouse gases are largely unaffected by visible light, allowing the sun’s rays not blocked by clouds or reflected by ice to come directly to us. But as these gases arrest Earth’s infrared light as it streams out to space, they redirect a portion of it back our way, warming our surface. The net result of these countless little dances is an increase in the temperature of the planet.
Here, then, is a simple model for a living planet: Take one ordinary star. Add a small rock ninety-four million miles away. If the rock is too cold, add a sky. Then watch as the magic happens. The sun shines, the planet tries to return its borrowed light to space, and little dancing gases in the atmosphere play a constant game of catch and release, throwing some of the outgoing light back down to its surface. The temperature rises and stabilizes, the rock swings round its mediocre little star, and all the stories on Earth begin.
Water is perfectly suited to live on a planet like ours. The temperatures at which it takes solid, liquid, and gaseous form are easily found on Earth. This shape-shifting ability makes it an eager traveler, able to make itself at home in the far reaches of the world. It can hitch a ride to the sky on rising air, flow as liquid along the ground, and lock itself up in solid ice. In its gaseous form, it’s a potent trapper of heat: Water vapor accounts for about half of the naturally occurring greenhouse effect that makes the planet livable. So water, that amazing molecule, even knows how to dance.
I feel I should have more compassion for these men. I, too, believe in things that don’t exist, like a level of education I could reach that would stop them explaining things to me. And it’s true that once upon a time the “saturation effect” was a source of confusion in the scientific community. But that was resolved many years ago. This is how science works: It establishes things and then moves on. This is a good thing because it allows us to ask new questions. We do not constantly relitigate matters that have been settled for years. University and government physics laboratories are not full of scientists sliding balls down inclined planes to see what will happen. Professional chemists do not mix vinegar and baking soda in papier-mâché volcanoes. So yes, the scientific community was once confused about the saturation effect. Now we’re not. If the confusion persists, despite decades of careful explanations and patient rebuttals, that is perhaps not the scientists’ fault.
I’m also aware that I live in a culture that has words for emotional women, none of which are compliments. Still, I am a scientist at heart, which means I always want more data. I haven’t been trained to ignore things this important. So I think we should be as honest about observing and documenting our emotions as we are about measuring rainfall or soil moisture. Pretending we feel nothing about our changing world doesn’t make us objective. It makes us liars.
One of the best climate books I have ever read! Marvel is a great storyteller, and infuses so much energy and joy and intelligence into the subject, it helps my climate anxiety a teensy bit. I just read, in The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary McBride, a definition of emotions as being evolution’s gift to navigate the world, so I am all in on showing your emotions and mixing them in with the science, it makes it so much more genuine and real. I can’t believe we are in a time where the old white people in power are continuing to deny climate change and trying to mine coal again, I really am flabbergasted, astonished in a bad way, and furious. I have to reframe it as what will hopefully be the last gasp of their time in power, the last gasp of climate deniers, even though it may cause so many damage and last until I am gone, and I live in hope that I am wrong, that reality will become real for them earlier than that.
No matter what the scientists seem to say, it may need to get worse, and children of today may have to grow up in a terrible atmosphere with dirty water, plastics in their blood, and no green anymore from living things to see what the scientists are talking about, and maybe then things will change. I just don’t know how else to reach them. This book will not. But it is good for those of us in reality.
I’m an Earth scientist, and I study the planet using climate models made from equations and code. On these digital worlds, I can set off volcanoes, take away the wind, and make the world spin backward. I can blot out the sun at will. I can change the chemistry of the atmosphere with a few keystrokes. I can imagine people living in these worlds. Every day, I do terrible things to them. No one cares at all. None of it is real.
It’s impossible to feel sad or angry or frightened about things that happen to an Earth that exists only on a hard drive. But these fake planets are the best way we have of understanding the real one, both as it is now and how it will be. Scientists have used climate models for decades to see possible futures. Now these long-predicted changes are coming to pass. It’s not just the digital atmosphere that’s full of greenhouse gases; it’s our atmosphere. It’s not a toy planet burning; it’s our beloved Earth. Climate change isn’t just happening to ones and zeros encoded on electronic switches. It’s happening here. It’s happening to me—to us. And believe me, I have feelings about that.
Our curse is also our gift. The models we use to predict danger and doom also show us amazement and beauty and joy. It’s a wonderful thing to watch the future unfold before you, to filter the world through elegant equations until it gives you something that looks an awful lot like prophecy. But to understand the future of the planet, you must understand its present: the hot tropics and freezing poles, the climb of wet air over a damp mountainside, the gentle breeze blowing in from the sea on a hot day. You must sit there for a while, waiting for the world to show you its beautiful and terrible secrets, listening to the now for the faint echoes of futures to come. The gravity that pulls the tired autumn leaves to the ground is the same force that hurls the world around the sun, the motion of every falling leaf a hard promise that spring will come again. It is a gift to be alive, to be able to notice things. We scientists are among the luckiest creatures on Earth; we are allowed to know.
Now we know the sun is just a star, one of a hundred billion in the Milky Way, itself an unexceptional galaxy among a hundred billion others. It rises not because a dazzling man drives a golden chariot across the sky but because every twenty-four hours Earth turns on its axis and shows its darkened face to the light. We know the planet is angled on that axis, and as it moves around the sun, winter will come to the tilted-away half. It’s all predictable and ordinary, dictated by rigid laws. But even this regimented order has space for strange and wonderful things. Our sun is only medium-sized, as stars go, but big enough to shine. Inside its inner core the temperature is so high that the ordinary rules of physics cease to apply and tiny charged particles that should repel one another are instead smashed together. This is the miraculous process of nuclear fusion. The sun is in the constant alchemical business of changing stuff to light, matter to pure and shining energy. We’re lucky that this is the way nature has arranged to sustain our world. If the sun were fueled by coal, it would have burned itself out long ago.
We’re lucky to live in a very particular “Goldilocks” zone the perfect distance from our star. But even this fortunate location is not enough to make our planet livable. Based on its distance from the sun, the average temperature of Earth should be around -18°C (0°F). Too cold, in short, for life to exist. Clearly, the planet is warmer than this. To understand why, we need to know three things. First, the sun shines, but so do we. Physics says that everything with a temperature—which is to say, everything—radiates its own light out to the world. Hot objects emit far more than cold ones do, but everything everywhere has no choice but to shine. You yourself are doing so right now, incandescent with the power of a 100-watt bulb. The planet on which you live is radiating, too, receiving the sun’s intense light, warming in response, and shedding its borrowed energy back into space. Second, the planet shines differently than the sun. This is because how something radiates depends on its temperature. A heated object gives off different kinds of light as it warms up, turning red, orange, blue, and then white-hot like the sun, a blazing mix of all the colors. Our eyes have evolved to see the stuff our sun gives us, which we imaginatively call visible light.
This is the third thing to know: We exist only because the sky does. A tiny fraction of our atmosphere consists of molecules that absorb infrared light. These are the naturally occurring greenhouse gases: water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. They capture Earth’s outgoing light because they can dance. When these molecules are hit by outgoing infrared radiation, the bonds that hold their atoms together start to vibrate, turning light energy into motion.
Eventually, the dance stops and the light is spat back out in every direction. These greenhouse gases are largely unaffected by visible light, allowing the sun’s rays not blocked by clouds or reflected by ice to come directly to us. But as these gases arrest Earth’s infrared light as it streams out to space, they redirect a portion of it back our way, warming our surface. The net result of these countless little dances is an increase in the temperature of the planet.
Here, then, is a simple model for a living planet: Take one ordinary star. Add a small rock ninety-four million miles away. If the rock is too cold, add a sky. Then watch as the magic happens. The sun shines, the planet tries to return its borrowed light to space, and little dancing gases in the atmosphere play a constant game of catch and release, throwing some of the outgoing light back down to its surface. The temperature rises and stabilizes, the rock swings round its mediocre little star, and all the stories on Earth begin.
Water is perfectly suited to live on a planet like ours. The temperatures at which it takes solid, liquid, and gaseous form are easily found on Earth. This shape-shifting ability makes it an eager traveler, able to make itself at home in the far reaches of the world. It can hitch a ride to the sky on rising air, flow as liquid along the ground, and lock itself up in solid ice. In its gaseous form, it’s a potent trapper of heat: Water vapor accounts for about half of the naturally occurring greenhouse effect that makes the planet livable. So water, that amazing molecule, even knows how to dance.
I feel I should have more compassion for these men. I, too, believe in things that don’t exist, like a level of education I could reach that would stop them explaining things to me. And it’s true that once upon a time the “saturation effect” was a source of confusion in the scientific community. But that was resolved many years ago. This is how science works: It establishes things and then moves on. This is a good thing because it allows us to ask new questions. We do not constantly relitigate matters that have been settled for years. University and government physics laboratories are not full of scientists sliding balls down inclined planes to see what will happen. Professional chemists do not mix vinegar and baking soda in papier-mâché volcanoes. So yes, the scientific community was once confused about the saturation effect. Now we’re not. If the confusion persists, despite decades of careful explanations and patient rebuttals, that is perhaps not the scientists’ fault.
September 12, 2025
Dr Marvel’s ‘Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet’ is a wonderfully balanced book. It offers clear and detailed scientific information, which logically ties all the climate clues together, while at the same being unashamedly and unapologetically a personal account of the range of feelings that the climate crisis brings.
Marvel’s writing is peppered with a sharp dry wit and crackles with a passion for climate action. She draws on the wonderful power of storytelling and compares the hubris of modern humans in their fossil fuel lives, with the classical figures of mythology to suggest that the lessons still haven’t been learned. The chapters of the book are entitled with major emotions, such as ‘Wonder’/ ‘Anger’/ ‘Fear’/ ‘Pride’ which read like mythological characters progressing on a quest. Marvel makes the powerful point that the humanity of climate scientists does not cloud their judgment, but rather enhances it with a love of what can be saved. “I’m sad, desperately so, when I think about all the things we’ll lose. I’m afraid of the disasters I know are coming. I’m proud and surprised and hopeful and utterly in love with our beautiful world, I feel so much.”
As a scientist well versed in using climate models to better understand the impact of climate scenarios, Marvel focuses our attention on our living model- one that is our home. “Scientists have used climate models for decades to see possible futures. Now these long-predicted changes are coming to pass…It’s not a toy planet burning; it’s our beloved Earth.” She compares climate scientists to modern day Cassandra- like figures: “We see the tragedy that awaits; we try to warn of it.”
“Yes, it’s real. Yes, it’s us. Yes, it’s bad. Yes, we’re sure.”
Repeatedly in the book, Marvel hammers home the point that the scientific information of climate change has been known for many decades and that we appear to be more interested in ‘watching Rome burn’, than in taking the action which will make us the heroes of our own story. “The evidence is overwhelming, the science unequivocal: The world is warming because of greenhouse gases.” She rails at the ignorance- oftentimes deliberate ignorance- of those who fail to understand scientific uncertainty and attempt to use it to delay further climate action. “I am angry at the cynicism, the lies, and the greed. I feel burning rage when I hear the same tired talking points, the falsehoods repeated credulously by people who should (and do) know better. And I’m absolutely furious when I see the uncertainty inherent in the scientific method twisted into something evil.”
Marvel’s writing style lifts the words off the page. Her command of the cadence and rhythm of language leads to arguments being well balanced and emphasised.
“We are more sure that greenhouse gases are warming the planet than we are that smoking causes cancer…To stop the planet warming, we simply have to stop emitting them.”
Marvel argues powerfully that we are the agents of change and the future that we hand to our children must contain the acknowledgement and apology that humans have been poor guardians of the planet so far. “When we accept our own responsibility, we gain a powerful truth: How bad it gets is up to us. The future is still in human hands.”
The future matters for Marvel and she argues that we have an immense and unprecedented challenge ahead of us, as the planet changes. “The future remains uncertain. But I’m sending my children there, and they are never coming back.” The political choices that humans make now to act cooperatively, will create this future world- whether it is a world of conflict, limited resources and fear, or whether it will be a peaceful world remains in our control. “We can’t predict what future climate disruption will do to geopolitics, conflict, or the risk of war. But it would be unwise to think it will make the world a more peaceful place.” Marvel continues this argument, that our future world depends on our choices now by saying, “It’s true we don’t know what future climate change will look like. And this is mostly because we don’t know what choices humans will make.” Unprecedented human action to fight against this all too real climate monster is a choice that we need to make so that compound climate events do not continue to imperil us.
The world is not supposed to warm this quickly
Marvel negates the arguments from climate deniers and delayers that ‘climate change has always happened’ by adroitly pointing out that, “The planet’s temperature goes up and down irregularly, like many unsynchronised hearts beating together. What it does not do is rise consistently for more than a century.” This pace that we have caused and then witnessed rightfully causes concern. “The pace of recent climate change is stunningly, bewilderingly fast…The world is not supposed to warm this quickly, to change this suddenly. It never has, or at least not since humans (or anything like humans) have existed. It feels wrong. It is wrong.”
Marvel urges that in this climate emergency, we should be ‘throwing everything at the problem’, but cautions against the ‘silver bullets’ of geoengineering, which continue to hold unknown dangers. She acknowledges that, “Miracles are possible. But it’s a terrible strategy to bet the planet on one.”
We are urged not to be the ‘mad scientists’ of shock horror B movies, creating the golems of climate technological saviours, as we have no idea what climate chimeras we might unleash.
Marvel asks instead that we act out of love and compassion- compassion for our world and for ourselves, so that future generations may look on us with pride and gratitude for a job well done. She quotes the great Carl Sagan, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” We are the writers of this new climate story- one which will be passed down generations, as the myths of the classical past have been gifted to us. Marvel describes this simple and powerful act- a journey that no one has gone on before, but a path which we all must chart.
“At bedtime we read stories about heroes and monsters, quests fulfilled against impossible odds. I tell him that to stop climate change, we will have to do something that no one has done before. But that, he knows, is what happens in any story worth telling.”
Leibniz’s words, popularised by Voltaire, bring Marvel’s ‘Human Nature’ to a close. ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ We are reminded again by Marvel that the planet that we have damaged, and continue to damage, is our only home- our once and future home.
“We can only live here, together. Here in the world that we have changed so much. Here, shining out into cold space where there is no darkness, only light we cannot see.”
Marvel’s writing is peppered with a sharp dry wit and crackles with a passion for climate action. She draws on the wonderful power of storytelling and compares the hubris of modern humans in their fossil fuel lives, with the classical figures of mythology to suggest that the lessons still haven’t been learned. The chapters of the book are entitled with major emotions, such as ‘Wonder’/ ‘Anger’/ ‘Fear’/ ‘Pride’ which read like mythological characters progressing on a quest. Marvel makes the powerful point that the humanity of climate scientists does not cloud their judgment, but rather enhances it with a love of what can be saved. “I’m sad, desperately so, when I think about all the things we’ll lose. I’m afraid of the disasters I know are coming. I’m proud and surprised and hopeful and utterly in love with our beautiful world, I feel so much.”
As a scientist well versed in using climate models to better understand the impact of climate scenarios, Marvel focuses our attention on our living model- one that is our home. “Scientists have used climate models for decades to see possible futures. Now these long-predicted changes are coming to pass…It’s not a toy planet burning; it’s our beloved Earth.” She compares climate scientists to modern day Cassandra- like figures: “We see the tragedy that awaits; we try to warn of it.”
“Yes, it’s real. Yes, it’s us. Yes, it’s bad. Yes, we’re sure.”
Repeatedly in the book, Marvel hammers home the point that the scientific information of climate change has been known for many decades and that we appear to be more interested in ‘watching Rome burn’, than in taking the action which will make us the heroes of our own story. “The evidence is overwhelming, the science unequivocal: The world is warming because of greenhouse gases.” She rails at the ignorance- oftentimes deliberate ignorance- of those who fail to understand scientific uncertainty and attempt to use it to delay further climate action. “I am angry at the cynicism, the lies, and the greed. I feel burning rage when I hear the same tired talking points, the falsehoods repeated credulously by people who should (and do) know better. And I’m absolutely furious when I see the uncertainty inherent in the scientific method twisted into something evil.”
Marvel’s writing style lifts the words off the page. Her command of the cadence and rhythm of language leads to arguments being well balanced and emphasised.
“We are more sure that greenhouse gases are warming the planet than we are that smoking causes cancer…To stop the planet warming, we simply have to stop emitting them.”
Marvel argues powerfully that we are the agents of change and the future that we hand to our children must contain the acknowledgement and apology that humans have been poor guardians of the planet so far. “When we accept our own responsibility, we gain a powerful truth: How bad it gets is up to us. The future is still in human hands.”
The future matters for Marvel and she argues that we have an immense and unprecedented challenge ahead of us, as the planet changes. “The future remains uncertain. But I’m sending my children there, and they are never coming back.” The political choices that humans make now to act cooperatively, will create this future world- whether it is a world of conflict, limited resources and fear, or whether it will be a peaceful world remains in our control. “We can’t predict what future climate disruption will do to geopolitics, conflict, or the risk of war. But it would be unwise to think it will make the world a more peaceful place.” Marvel continues this argument, that our future world depends on our choices now by saying, “It’s true we don’t know what future climate change will look like. And this is mostly because we don’t know what choices humans will make.” Unprecedented human action to fight against this all too real climate monster is a choice that we need to make so that compound climate events do not continue to imperil us.
The world is not supposed to warm this quickly
Marvel negates the arguments from climate deniers and delayers that ‘climate change has always happened’ by adroitly pointing out that, “The planet’s temperature goes up and down irregularly, like many unsynchronised hearts beating together. What it does not do is rise consistently for more than a century.” This pace that we have caused and then witnessed rightfully causes concern. “The pace of recent climate change is stunningly, bewilderingly fast…The world is not supposed to warm this quickly, to change this suddenly. It never has, or at least not since humans (or anything like humans) have existed. It feels wrong. It is wrong.”
Marvel urges that in this climate emergency, we should be ‘throwing everything at the problem’, but cautions against the ‘silver bullets’ of geoengineering, which continue to hold unknown dangers. She acknowledges that, “Miracles are possible. But it’s a terrible strategy to bet the planet on one.”
We are urged not to be the ‘mad scientists’ of shock horror B movies, creating the golems of climate technological saviours, as we have no idea what climate chimeras we might unleash.
Marvel asks instead that we act out of love and compassion- compassion for our world and for ourselves, so that future generations may look on us with pride and gratitude for a job well done. She quotes the great Carl Sagan, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” We are the writers of this new climate story- one which will be passed down generations, as the myths of the classical past have been gifted to us. Marvel describes this simple and powerful act- a journey that no one has gone on before, but a path which we all must chart.
“At bedtime we read stories about heroes and monsters, quests fulfilled against impossible odds. I tell him that to stop climate change, we will have to do something that no one has done before. But that, he knows, is what happens in any story worth telling.”
Leibniz’s words, popularised by Voltaire, bring Marvel’s ‘Human Nature’ to a close. ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ We are reminded again by Marvel that the planet that we have damaged, and continue to damage, is our only home- our once and future home.
“We can only live here, together. Here in the world that we have changed so much. Here, shining out into cold space where there is no darkness, only light we cannot see.”
July 10, 2025
4.5 rounded up to 5 ⭐️
Such a well-rounded take on our current situation. It's thoughtful, knowledgeable, and insightful. I too wish we lived in a timeline where people in power listened to scientists and did the right thing for all of us.
Such a well-rounded take on our current situation. It's thoughtful, knowledgeable, and insightful. I too wish we lived in a timeline where people in power listened to scientists and did the right thing for all of us.
September 6, 2025
Kate Marvel writes so beautifully and so sadly about the world we have forsaken that it is quite tempting to forget she is an accomplished climate scientist, that she does the cold, hard math to prove we are on the path toward destruction, and that we’d better get on the bus soon and quit burning fossil fuels.
We are “in a dress rehearsal for something much worse,” Marvel notes. Climate change will make us panic, blame others, and ultimately commit violent acts against one another. Indeed, there is human depravity, but no human nature, per se. We can change this.
In the rush to blame the waves of immigrants for taking our birthright away, let’s not forget that nobody actually wants to leave their home.
Circumstances force their hands.
We are “in a dress rehearsal for something much worse,” Marvel notes. Climate change will make us panic, blame others, and ultimately commit violent acts against one another. Indeed, there is human depravity, but no human nature, per se. We can change this.
In the rush to blame the waves of immigrants for taking our birthright away, let’s not forget that nobody actually wants to leave their home.
Circumstances force their hands.
January 4, 2026
Author Kate Marvel does a great job bringing the reader in and getting them hooked to her storytelling. And only she talking about climate change in global warming, but she leaves a lot of history and story behind each of her points and feelings. I really enjoyed the use of legend And other aspects to help get across her points.
The narration by Courtney Patterson excellently compliments, the storytelling vibe of the book. The book is written in a storytelling fashion, and Courtney does a great job creating a relationship with the reader, almost like a friendship through her narration.
Overall, I think Kate gets her point across about the hazards and what our future is going to look like with the current crisis that we are seeing, but she doesn’t in a very open and engaging way.
The narration by Courtney Patterson excellently compliments, the storytelling vibe of the book. The book is written in a storytelling fashion, and Courtney does a great job creating a relationship with the reader, almost like a friendship through her narration.
Overall, I think Kate gets her point across about the hazards and what our future is going to look like with the current crisis that we are seeing, but she doesn’t in a very open and engaging way.
September 17, 2025
Exploring science and history through emotions, Dr. Kate Marvel’s "Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel about Our Changing Planet," researched our planet’s past, current events, and potential future. With captivating facts and quotations, the chapters emphasize: Wonder, Anger, Guilt, Fear, Grief, Surprise, Pride, Hope, and Love. As an astrophysicist, cosmologist, and climate scientist, Marvel provides extensive references, notes, and acknowledgements to better understand our world.
Dr. Joseph Henry presented his work in 1856, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.” His atmospheric discovery that would “give our earth a high temperature” and “could change the world” produced little interest. Although Eunice Foote was referenced in "Scientific American," her experiments, findings, and projections were dismissed. Sadly, she may have been the “first climate scientist to be ignored.”
Rock climbers and outdoor enthusiasts, John and Louisa Tyndall, identified greenhouse gases among other findings. Honored with a professorship of natural philosophy and elected to the Royal Society, unfortunately John did not credit his wife for her research and accomplishments. Louisa’s experiments and attention to detail contributed to scientific journals and various publications.
Examples of historical data doubt were illustrated throughout the book. Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius identified the ice age and predicted climate change in 1896; nonetheless, other scientists and the fossil fuel industry challenged his research. During the 1950s American oceanographers studied atmospheric pressures resulting in Charles David Keeling’s theory known as the “Keeling Curve” caused by “excess carbon dioxide emitted by human activities…warming the world.” Refusal to accept global climate exploration was stated in 1997 by the CEO of ExxonMobil, who denied the statistics, then designed creative experiments resulting in dangerous, false results.
Almost every land has experienced a “record-shattering heat wave in the last decade or so...” Extremes during the Great Depression were the effect of drought, overgrazing, poor land management, the industrial revolution, and excessive tilling. “The dust swirled in the atmosphere, buried farms, choked farmers, and their starving families.” Although most Midwest farmers have learned from the past, groundwater irrigation is limited due to depleting aquifers. Embracing exploration and investigation illustrates a willingness to accept science and make informed decisions.
“Frontline communities…face the history of shameful things: war, conquest, pollution, extraction, and...moral guilt.” Some regions have designed a “resilience plan” preparing for or preventing surging seas and effective wetland restoration in addition to “managed retreat” coastline resettlement opportunities.
The Mongols of 1211-1225 were skilled horsemen, “but their greatest weapon was fear. Rumors spread: roads lined with skulls, cities ablaze, massacres of men, women, and children…A small change in the climate, a short period of abundance...and within a few years the world became unrecognizable.” “We can’t predict what future climate disruption will do to geopolitics, conflict, of the risk or war. But it would be unwise to think it will make the world a more peaceful place.”
The Great London Smog of 1952, produced by burning coal, smoke, coal dust, fog, cold temperatures, and poor building ventilation, resulted in more than twelve thousand deaths. Concern about fog and pollution prompted President Harry Truman to pass clean air legislation in 1955; subsequently, the surgeon general investigated the causes of air pollution. Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency were founded, and the Clean Air Act of 1970 was signed by President Richard Nixon. This legislation saved lives, since dust, sand, wildfire smoke, pollen, and pollution damage human lungs. President George H. W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act of 1990 to reduce acid rain, urban air pollution, and toxic air emissions.
Marvel praised NASA’s Apollo 13 crew with its drilled, detailed, practiced contingency plans, and intensive training as a blueprint for dealing with failure. If we accept and address "Human Nature," we learn from the past to protect our beautiful Earth and turn our feelings into action.
“Earth contains multitudes: rock, air, ice, water, salt, living things…Everything is connected.”
Deforestation, grassland destruction, disease, urban heat, radiation, plastics, cement, and transportation have damaged the Earth’s natural shield, the ozone layer. This disappearing sunscreen can be replenished with improved transit, walkable cities, enhanced ecosystems, and environmental sustainability. Education and commitment to excellence are key factors.
If you are skeptical of climate change and trust the Earth is secure, read "Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel about Our Changing Planet." If you believe we are innately good and can accomplish tremendous feats, read Marvel’s book. Squabbling contradictions will not only divide us, since paradoxes deserve explanations. Learn more about our world and our potential to balance energy, strategize solutions, protect resources, and remain hopeful. What is your sense of Wonder, Anger, Guilt, Fear, Grief, Surprise, Pride, Hope, and Love?
Dr. Joseph Henry presented his work in 1856, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.” His atmospheric discovery that would “give our earth a high temperature” and “could change the world” produced little interest. Although Eunice Foote was referenced in "Scientific American," her experiments, findings, and projections were dismissed. Sadly, she may have been the “first climate scientist to be ignored.”
Rock climbers and outdoor enthusiasts, John and Louisa Tyndall, identified greenhouse gases among other findings. Honored with a professorship of natural philosophy and elected to the Royal Society, unfortunately John did not credit his wife for her research and accomplishments. Louisa’s experiments and attention to detail contributed to scientific journals and various publications.
Examples of historical data doubt were illustrated throughout the book. Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius identified the ice age and predicted climate change in 1896; nonetheless, other scientists and the fossil fuel industry challenged his research. During the 1950s American oceanographers studied atmospheric pressures resulting in Charles David Keeling’s theory known as the “Keeling Curve” caused by “excess carbon dioxide emitted by human activities…warming the world.” Refusal to accept global climate exploration was stated in 1997 by the CEO of ExxonMobil, who denied the statistics, then designed creative experiments resulting in dangerous, false results.
Almost every land has experienced a “record-shattering heat wave in the last decade or so...” Extremes during the Great Depression were the effect of drought, overgrazing, poor land management, the industrial revolution, and excessive tilling. “The dust swirled in the atmosphere, buried farms, choked farmers, and their starving families.” Although most Midwest farmers have learned from the past, groundwater irrigation is limited due to depleting aquifers. Embracing exploration and investigation illustrates a willingness to accept science and make informed decisions.
“Frontline communities…face the history of shameful things: war, conquest, pollution, extraction, and...moral guilt.” Some regions have designed a “resilience plan” preparing for or preventing surging seas and effective wetland restoration in addition to “managed retreat” coastline resettlement opportunities.
The Mongols of 1211-1225 were skilled horsemen, “but their greatest weapon was fear. Rumors spread: roads lined with skulls, cities ablaze, massacres of men, women, and children…A small change in the climate, a short period of abundance...and within a few years the world became unrecognizable.” “We can’t predict what future climate disruption will do to geopolitics, conflict, of the risk or war. But it would be unwise to think it will make the world a more peaceful place.”
The Great London Smog of 1952, produced by burning coal, smoke, coal dust, fog, cold temperatures, and poor building ventilation, resulted in more than twelve thousand deaths. Concern about fog and pollution prompted President Harry Truman to pass clean air legislation in 1955; subsequently, the surgeon general investigated the causes of air pollution. Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency were founded, and the Clean Air Act of 1970 was signed by President Richard Nixon. This legislation saved lives, since dust, sand, wildfire smoke, pollen, and pollution damage human lungs. President George H. W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act of 1990 to reduce acid rain, urban air pollution, and toxic air emissions.
Marvel praised NASA’s Apollo 13 crew with its drilled, detailed, practiced contingency plans, and intensive training as a blueprint for dealing with failure. If we accept and address "Human Nature," we learn from the past to protect our beautiful Earth and turn our feelings into action.
“Earth contains multitudes: rock, air, ice, water, salt, living things…Everything is connected.”
Deforestation, grassland destruction, disease, urban heat, radiation, plastics, cement, and transportation have damaged the Earth’s natural shield, the ozone layer. This disappearing sunscreen can be replenished with improved transit, walkable cities, enhanced ecosystems, and environmental sustainability. Education and commitment to excellence are key factors.
If you are skeptical of climate change and trust the Earth is secure, read "Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel about Our Changing Planet." If you believe we are innately good and can accomplish tremendous feats, read Marvel’s book. Squabbling contradictions will not only divide us, since paradoxes deserve explanations. Learn more about our world and our potential to balance energy, strategize solutions, protect resources, and remain hopeful. What is your sense of Wonder, Anger, Guilt, Fear, Grief, Surprise, Pride, Hope, and Love?
November 7, 2025
“Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet” (Kate Marvel, 2025) is a scientist’s examination of anthropogenic global warming from the perspective of emotions. “Human Nature”, within the book’s title, alludes to human influence which is changing our planet’s biosphere, as well as the nature of human emotional responses to those environmental changes. Current averaged global warming is abrupt: “The pace of recent climate change is stunningly, bewilderingly fast… The world is not supposed to warm this quickly, to change this suddenly” (page 110). As these changes affect us and our children with increasing severity, how can we feel? A spectrum of emotional responses is discussed - wonder, anger, guilt, fear, grief, surprise, pride, hope, and love. Aspects of psychology and climate science are intertwined throughout this book and explained with simplicity. Marvel writes from a highly personal level which makes her points credible, sincere, and relatable to readers. For example, she discusses her personal health issues to demonstrate her desire to live and her various personal connections with our planet (pages 221 - 223). Throughout this book, she’s not just describing climate science - she’s telling us why we should care, how she feels, and how we might feel - as individuals and as societies. Marvel points out “When food or fuel becomes expensive, people get angry. Irrate populations may begin to see the appeal of charismatic liars with easy answers…” (page 91). Does that sound familiar? It should. tRump campaigned in 2024 claiming he would reduce the cost of living for Americans but that was before the tariffs (which amusingly included an uninhabited island of penguins), increasing unemployment, and weakening job growth in 2025 - those are my personal observations and are not specified by the author. Marvel describes “the appeal of charismatic liars” and authoritarianism with respect to Rome and Egypt - Julius and Augustus Caesar, Mark Anthony, and Cleopatra. She mentions “Climate change threatens our food supply. It may also threaten our democracy” (page 91). This book is flawless except for a single questionable metaphor describing the growth of flowers: “…petals bursting out of their swelling buds like pus squeezed from a pimple” (page 217). Perhaps “like a butterfly’s wings unfolding upon emerging from a cocoon” or “like popcorn expanding from a kernel of corn” or literally any metaphor not relating to pus or bodily excretions would be preferable to describe the beauty and wonder of the growth of flowers - lol. I highly recommend this nearly flawless and overall excellent book.
January 25, 2026
What a comfort to get clear answers from a competent scientist. And what a relief to have my many unarticulated emotions about climate change articulated in a supportive and validating way! Add this important book to your climate syllabus. And if you don’t already have a climate syllabus, read this book and you will see how important it is to our planet that you get on board with understanding and caring for it.
“To know the future, you must know the present from which it springs.”
Marvel begins with Cassandra. Greek legend of prophecy. Infamously driven mad by what she knows and can’t get others to believe. And since most of my articulated emotions about climate change up until this point were abject terror and anger, the choice of myth made a lot of sense to me.
But this first chapter is called Wonder. It’s actually pretty jaw-dropping how deftly Marvel pairs Greek myth and climate science. By page 21, my mind exploded because she’d made such an elegant case: everything we needed to know about how our climate works had already been encoded in the legends of ancient gods. You need a degree in physics and a century of experiments to know what you are looking for, but it’s there.
“The planet, like us, has lost much before. But never quite like this. The breaking of a billion hearts at once. The world we love is being snatched away from us before its time.”
I’ll jump ahead to Grief. This is the emotion my 20-something waitress called out as soon as I told her the title of what I was reading. I confirmed that yes, grief was covered while hiding my devastation that this was the first feeling someone so young had about Nature in this moment of history.
We end on Love (after also covering guilt, anger, fear, surprise, pride, and hope). Marvel asks whether we are part of nature or separate, shares how and why she can move through the world in a state of “overwhelming grace” knowing what she knows, and offers additional solace by naming other complicated feelings. My favorite of these was “the queasy drip of diluted hope in a bleakness to which you have already reconciled yourself.”
Truly, all emotions are welcome! Pick this up and you will feel less alone on an irreversibly warmer planet.
“To know the future, you must know the present from which it springs.”
Marvel begins with Cassandra. Greek legend of prophecy. Infamously driven mad by what she knows and can’t get others to believe. And since most of my articulated emotions about climate change up until this point were abject terror and anger, the choice of myth made a lot of sense to me.
But this first chapter is called Wonder. It’s actually pretty jaw-dropping how deftly Marvel pairs Greek myth and climate science. By page 21, my mind exploded because she’d made such an elegant case: everything we needed to know about how our climate works had already been encoded in the legends of ancient gods. You need a degree in physics and a century of experiments to know what you are looking for, but it’s there.
“The planet, like us, has lost much before. But never quite like this. The breaking of a billion hearts at once. The world we love is being snatched away from us before its time.”
I’ll jump ahead to Grief. This is the emotion my 20-something waitress called out as soon as I told her the title of what I was reading. I confirmed that yes, grief was covered while hiding my devastation that this was the first feeling someone so young had about Nature in this moment of history.
We end on Love (after also covering guilt, anger, fear, surprise, pride, and hope). Marvel asks whether we are part of nature or separate, shares how and why she can move through the world in a state of “overwhelming grace” knowing what she knows, and offers additional solace by naming other complicated feelings. My favorite of these was “the queasy drip of diluted hope in a bleakness to which you have already reconciled yourself.”
Truly, all emotions are welcome! Pick this up and you will feel less alone on an irreversibly warmer planet.
Read
August 17, 2025For a book subtitled "Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet" and with chapter titles centered on emotions (Anger, Guilt, Wonder, etc.), I expected Human Nature to focus more on the emotional experience of living through climate change than on the science behind it. Sure, Marvel is a climate scientist with a PhD in theoretical physics, so of course there's going to be *some* science, but... there was a larger emphasis on the mechanics of climate change than I had anticipated.
That said, Marvel writes (mostly) accessibly about the science and incorporates humor and personal stories, but I guess I was hoping for more of an exploration of what we're supposed to do about all the emotions that come with accepting the science. I wasn't necessarily looking for a memoir or a deep unpacking of emotions, but maybe some practical insight about how to sit with, reframe, or even productively direct feelings like guilt, fear, anger, or despair. As someone who's pretty cerebral, but has strong feelings about climate, I was excited about the idea of a scientist's nerdy-but-human thoughts on how to navigate this terrain. That's not quite what we're getting here.
The "Guilt" chapter, for example, isn't about how to grapple with personal vs. systemic responsibility in the face of global crisis - rather, it's a scientific explanation of how we know humans, not natural forces, are driving climate change. And the "Wonder" chapter is surprisingly detailed regarding air currents!
Some of the later chapters do offer more personal reflection - Marvel writes about her family, places that matter to her, the fragility of life - but it's still not quite the guide I had hoped for. (And that's fine! But not what I expected.)
If you're looking for an accessible introduction to climate science that takes a personal angle, this may be a good fit. If you're hoping for a deeper conversation about how to live with the emotions around climate change - how a scientist balances hope and fear, for instance, and how to apply that to your own life - you may want to look elsewhere!
That said, Marvel writes (mostly) accessibly about the science and incorporates humor and personal stories, but I guess I was hoping for more of an exploration of what we're supposed to do about all the emotions that come with accepting the science. I wasn't necessarily looking for a memoir or a deep unpacking of emotions, but maybe some practical insight about how to sit with, reframe, or even productively direct feelings like guilt, fear, anger, or despair. As someone who's pretty cerebral, but has strong feelings about climate, I was excited about the idea of a scientist's nerdy-but-human thoughts on how to navigate this terrain. That's not quite what we're getting here.
The "Guilt" chapter, for example, isn't about how to grapple with personal vs. systemic responsibility in the face of global crisis - rather, it's a scientific explanation of how we know humans, not natural forces, are driving climate change. And the "Wonder" chapter is surprisingly detailed regarding air currents!
Some of the later chapters do offer more personal reflection - Marvel writes about her family, places that matter to her, the fragility of life - but it's still not quite the guide I had hoped for. (And that's fine! But not what I expected.)
If you're looking for an accessible introduction to climate science that takes a personal angle, this may be a good fit. If you're hoping for a deeper conversation about how to live with the emotions around climate change - how a scientist balances hope and fear, for instance, and how to apply that to your own life - you may want to look elsewhere!
December 30, 2025
First, the sun shines, but so do we. Physics says that everything with a temperature — which is to say, everything-radiates its own light out to the world. Hot objects emit far more than cold ones do, but everything everywhere has no choice but to shine. You yourself are doing so right now, incandescent with the power of a 100-watt bulb. The planet on which you live is radiating, too, receiving the sun's intense light, warming in response, and shedding its borrowed energy back into space.
***
I'm angry that we've known that greenhouse gases cause global warming for more than a century and have done very little to stop emitting them. And then I remember where these emissions come from and feel appropriately guilty. I'm sad, desperately so, when I think about all the things we'll lose. I'm afraid of the disasters I know are coming.
***
The pace of recent climate change is stunningly, bewilderingly fast. Most previous ages of the planet lived out healthy geological lifespans and died of natural causes. That is not what is happening now. The world is not supposed to warm this quickly, to change this suddenly. It never has, at least not since humans (or anything like humans) have existed. It feels wrong. It is wrong. This is not loss but violence.
***
Time is running out for other things, too. Already the mountain summer is hot and acrid and dangerous. There will be years in which the waterfalls roar with ample snowmelt after a flooded winter and years in which they dry to a trickle-and, maybe, years when the winter snows never arrive at all. I believe that we will be able to head off the worst-case scenarios by concerted and difficult action . . . Even I can't deny that terrible things are coming.
— Kate Marvel / Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
***
I'm angry that we've known that greenhouse gases cause global warming for more than a century and have done very little to stop emitting them. And then I remember where these emissions come from and feel appropriately guilty. I'm sad, desperately so, when I think about all the things we'll lose. I'm afraid of the disasters I know are coming.
***
The pace of recent climate change is stunningly, bewilderingly fast. Most previous ages of the planet lived out healthy geological lifespans and died of natural causes. That is not what is happening now. The world is not supposed to warm this quickly, to change this suddenly. It never has, at least not since humans (or anything like humans) have existed. It feels wrong. It is wrong. This is not loss but violence.
***
Time is running out for other things, too. Already the mountain summer is hot and acrid and dangerous. There will be years in which the waterfalls roar with ample snowmelt after a flooded winter and years in which they dry to a trickle-and, maybe, years when the winter snows never arrive at all. I believe that we will be able to head off the worst-case scenarios by concerted and difficult action . . . Even I can't deny that terrible things are coming.
— Kate Marvel / Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
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