Collapse of Western Civilization

Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. Her 2004 essay The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, cited by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth (2006), led to op-ed pieces in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and to Congressional testimony in the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. With Erik Conway, she is the author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology employed by the California Institute of Technology. He recently received a NASA History award for pathbreaking contributions to space history ranging from aeronautics to Earth and space sciences and an AIAA History Manuscript Award for his fourth book,. Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History.

The year is 2393, and a senior scholar of the Second People's Republic of China presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment, the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies, entered into a Penumbral period in the early decades of the twenty-first century, a time when sound science and rational discourse about global change were prohibited and clear warnings of climate catastrophe were ignored. What ensues when soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, drought, and mass migrations disrupt the global governmental and economic regimes? The Great Collapse of 2093. Based on sound scholarship yet unafraid to tilt at sacred cows in both science and policy, this book provides a welcome moment of clarity amid the cacophony of climate change literature. It includes a lexicon of historical and scientific terms that enriches the narrative and an interview with the authors.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Coming of the Penumbral Age2. The Frenzy of Fossil Fuels3. Market FailureEpilogueLexicon of Archaic TermsInterview with the AuthorsNotesAbout the Authors