Overheated

by Andrew T. Guzman, Fleet Cooper (Reading)

Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order. In Overheated , Guzman takes climate change out of the realm of scientific abstraction to explore its real-world consequences. He writes not as a scientist, but as an authority on international law and economics. He takes as his starting point a fairly optimistic outcome in the range predicted by a 2 degree Celsius increase in average global temperatures. Even this modest rise would lead to catastrophic environmental and social problems. Already we can see how it will The ten warmest years since 1880 have all occurred since 1998, and one estimate of the annual global death toll caused by climate change is now 300,000. That number might rise to 500,000 by 2030. He shows in vivid detail how climate change is already playing out in the real world. Rising seas will swamp island nations like Maldives; coastal food-producing regions in Bangladesh will be flooded; and millions will be forced to migrate into cities or possibly "climate-refugee camps." Even as seas rise, melting glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas will deprive millions upon millions of people of fresh water, threatening major cities and further straining food production. Prolonged droughts in the Sahel region of Africa have already helped produce mass violence in Darfur. Clear, cogent, and compelling, Overheated shifts the discussion on climate change toward its devastating impact on human societies. Two degrees Celsius seems such a minor change. Yet it will change everything. The accompanying reference guide is included as a PDF on this disc.

MP3 CD

Published August 9, 2016

About the author

Andrew Guzman is Professor of Law, Director of the Advanced Law Degree Programs, and Associate Dean for International and Executive Education at Berkeley Law School, University of California, Berkeley. Professor Guzman holds a J.D. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He has written extensively on international trade, international regulatory matters, foreign direct investment and public international law. He is the author of Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change, How International Law Works both from Oxford University Press and International Trade Law from Wolters Kluwer.
Professor Guzman served as editor for the Research Handbook In International Economic Law, published by Edward Elgar Press and Regulation and Competition in the Global Economy: Cooperation, Comity, and Competition Policy, published by Oxford University Press. Professor Guzman is a member of the Board of Editors of several journals including the Journal of International Economic Law and the International Review of Law and Economics. He is also a member of the Academic Council of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration and has served as an international arbitrator.