William Ernest McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change, and Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019), about the state of the environmental challenges facing humanity and future prospects.
Climate engineering is an umbrella term for both carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation modification, when applied at a planetary scale. However, these two processes have very different characteristics. For this reason, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change no longer uses this overarching term. Carbon dioxide removal approaches are part of climate change mitigation. Solar radiation modification is reflecting some sunlight back to space. Some publications place passive radiative cooling into the climate engineering category. This technology increases the Earth's thermal emittance. The media tends to use climate engineering also for other technologies such as glacier stabilization, ocean liming, and iron fertilization of oceans. The latter would modify carbon sequestration processes that take place in oceans.
Wallace "Wally" Smith Broecker was an American geochemist. He was the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, a scientist at Columbia's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and a sustainability fellow at Arizona State University. He developed the idea of a global "conveyor belt" linking the circulation of the global ocean and made major contributions to the science of the carbon cycle and the use of chemical tracers and isotope dating in oceanography. Broecker popularized the term "global warming". He received the Crafoord Prize and the Vetlesen Prize.
Mark Lynas is a British author and journalist whose work is focused on environmentalism and climate change. He has written for the New Statesman, The Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, and The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK, as well as the New York Times and Washington Post in the United States; he also worked on and appeared in the film The Age of Stupid. He was born in Fiji, grew up in Peru, Spain and the United Kingdom and holds a degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh. He has published several books including Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007) and The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (2011). Lynas is research and climate lead for the Alliance for Science and is co-founder of the pro-science environmental network RePlanet. Since 2009 he has been climate advisor to former president of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed, and he currently works to assist Nasheed with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of the world's most climate-vulnerable 58 developing countries. He is a strategic advisor for the international ecomodernist NGO WePlanet. He has co-authored a number of peer-reviewed scientific publications, including a 2021 paper which found that the consensus on anthropogenic climate change in the scholarly literature now exceeds 99%.
Carl Zimmer is a popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity. The author of many books, he contributes science essays to publications such as The New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic. He is a fellow at Yale University's Morse College and adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. Zimmer also gives frequent lectures and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio's Radiolab, Fresh Air, and This American Life.
Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist, author, and visiting fellow at Williams College.
Jeff Biggers is an American Book Award-winning historian, journalist, playwright, and monologist. He is the author and editor of ten books. His most recent book, In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy, is a cultural history and travelogue of the island. In the fall of 2024, he will release his first novel, Disturbing the Bones, coauthored with celebrated film director Andrew Davis.
Oliver Morton is a British science writer and editor. He has written for many publications, including The American Scholar, Discover,The Economist,The Independent, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,National Geographic,Nature, The New Yorker, Newsweek International, Prospect, and Wired.
Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics’ Pick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Kenneth Caldeira is an American atmospheric scientist. His areas of research include ocean acidification, climate effects of trees, intentional climate modification, interactions in the global carbon cycle/climate system, and sustainable energy.
Richard Conniff is an American non-fiction writer, specializing in human and animal behavior.
Andrew C. Revkin is an American science and environmental journalist, webcaster, author and educator. He has written on a wide range of subjects including destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the 2004 Asian tsunami, sustainable development, climate change, and the changing environment around the North Pole. From 2019 to 2023 he directed the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at The Earth Institute of Columbia University. While at Columbia, he launched a video webcast, Sustain What, that seeks solutions to tangled environmental and societal challenges through dialogue. In 2023, the webcast integrated with his Substack dispatch of the same name.
David W. Keith is a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He joined the University of Chicago in April 2023. Keith previously served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics for Harvard University's Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and professor of public policy for the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. Early contributions include development of the first atom interferometer and a Fourier-transform spectrometer used by NASA to measure atmospheric temperature and radiation transfer from space.
Roy Scranton is an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His essays, journalism, short fiction, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Dissent, LIT, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Boston Review. His first book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene was published by City Lights. His novel War Porn was released by Soho Press in August 2016. It was called "One of the best and most disturbing war novels in years" by Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. He co-edited Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. He currently teaches at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.
Kenneth Randall Light is an American social documentary photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of twelve monographs, including Midnight La Frontera, What'sGoing On? 1969-1974,Delta Time, TexasDeath Row and, most recently, Course of the Empire, published by Steidl. He wrote Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, a collection of recollections and interviews with 29 of the world's most well-known photographers, editors and curators of the genre. He has had his photographs included as part of photo essays and portfolios in newspapers, magazines and other media, has been exhibited worldwide and is part of museum collections such as SF Museum of Modern Art and International Center of Photography. Light was also a co-founder of Fotovision, the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts photography fellowships. He is also a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley where he holds the Reva and David Logan chair in photojournalism and he is the director of the school's Logan documentary photography gallery.
Gernot Wagner is an Austro-American climate economist at Columbia Business School, where he is a tenured full professor. He holds an AB and a PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University, as well as an MA in economics from Stanford University. A founding co-director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program (2017-2019) he joined the faculty of New York University in 2019, moving to Columbia University in 2022. Wagner writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, and is the co-author, with Martin L. Weitzman, of Climate Shock, a Top 15 Financial Times-McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2015. He won the "Austrian of the Year" award in 2022, awarded by Austrian daily Die Presse.
Kate Marvel is a climate scientist and science writer based in New York City. She is a senior scientist at Project Drawdown and was formerly an associate research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia Engineering's Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics.
On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal is Naomi Klein's seventh book, published in September 2019 by Simon & Schuster. On Fire is a collection of essays focusing on climate change and the urgent actions needed to preserve the planet.
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is a 2021 environmental book by Elizabeth Kolbert. The book follows many of the themes she explored in The Sixth Extinction.
Termination Shock is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 2021. The book is set in a near-future when climate change has significantly altered human society and follows the attempts of a solar geoengineering scheme. The novel focuses on the geopolitical and social consequences of the rogue fix for climate change, themes common in the growing climate fiction genre.
