Follow the author

A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions Paperback – Bargain Price, March 21, 2011

by Katharine Hayhoe (Author), Andrew Farley (Author)

67

Most Christian lifestyle or environmental books focus on how to live in a sustainable and conservational manner. A CLIMATE FOR CHANGE shows why Christians should be living that way, and the consequences of doing so. Drawing on the two authors' experiences, one as an internationally recognized climate scientist and the other as an evangelical leader of a growing church, this book explains the science underlying global warming, the impact that human activities have on it, and how our Christian faith should play a significant role in guiding our opinions and actions on this important issue.

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

FaithWords
Publication date

March 21, 2011
Dimensions

5.25 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
See all details

Katharine Hayhoe
581
Paperback
73 offers from $10.98
Mark A. Noll
231
Paperback
28 offers from $15.72
Naomi Oreskes
1,851
Paperback
104 offers from $2.99

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In the midst of one of the most heated debates of my lifetime, there are some voices that offer calm and respectful insight to people of faith. Balancing passion with civility, Hayhoe and Farley speak with such a voice. No matter what you believe about climate change's causes or effects, A CLIMATE FOR CHANGE will challenge you to think critically about both the issue and your responsibility to respond." (Jonathan Merritt, faith and culture writer, national spokesperson, Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative )

About the Author

Katharine Hayhoe is a research associate professor in the department of geosciences at Texas Tech University and CEO of ATMOS Research, a scientific consulting company providing climate change and impact analyses to city, state, provincial, and federal agencies. Her studies have been presented before the U.S. Congress and highlighted by state and federal agencies in support of actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.

Andrew Farley is pastor of Lubbock Bible Church. He served as a professor of Applied Linguistics at University of Notre Dame for five years and is now a tenured professor at Texas Tech University. In addition to more than a dozen journal articles, Andrew has also authored a book and coauthored two textbooks, two workbooks, and two multimedia publications with McGraw-Hill.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00AK2TIRY
Publisher ‏ : ‎ FaithWords; Reprint edition (March 21, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches

Customer Reviews:
67

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Katharine Hayhoe

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Katharine is an atmospheric scientist who studies what climate change means to us here and now, and how our choices will determine our future.

She is the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy and a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University; she also serves as climate ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance.

Katharine has been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People, Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers, Fortune's World's Greatest Leaders and Working Mother’s 50 Most Influential Moms. She is a United Nations Champion of the Earth and hosts the PBS Digital YouTube series, Global Weirding and is a founding member of Science Moms.

Follow @KHayhoe on Twitter for frequent updates on the latest climate change science, and https://www.facebook.com/katharine.hayhoe for more in-depth discussions.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

67 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Jenny Strovas

The science behind climate change - without political undertones!

Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2009

Verified Purchase

I come from a very conservative Christian family who appreciates science and all it has done to improve our society, but is also skeptical of the science behind "liberal" agendas. Since people like Al Gore are outspoken on climate issues, many conservative Christians tend to think that climate change is strictly a democratic platform and therefore is not entirely scientific. "A Climate for Change" takes the political issues out of climate change and presents the hard science in an easy to read and logical format.

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is a climate science professor at Texas Tech University and served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. These credentials merit her expertise in the field of climate change. Dr. Andrew Farley is a linguist professor at Texas Tech University and pastor of a local evangelical church. His thoughts on Christianity, and our responsibility for the earth and its inhabitants, bring a special focus that no other books on climate change currently offer.

I highly suggest buying this book for the conservative Christian in your family who can't seem to move past the political undertones of climate change. It presents the basic science behind our changing climate and debunks some commonly used arguments against human induced climate change (for example: "Don't scientists disagree whether climate change is currently happening and whether it is being caused and/or exacerbated by human actions?"-NO!)

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

True Seeker

Fact Not Fiction

Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2012

Verified Purchase

Before I read this book, I had read only articles about global warning which- I feared were one person's opinion. Dr. Hayhoe and her husband Dr. Farley give all the information you can want to prove that global warming is occurring and that we'd better do what we can to help our children prepare for it and to help those who are already being affected by it in other parts of the world.
If you are a fence sitter on the topic of global warming, you'd better read this book. I'm certainly glad I did.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Fulton J. Waterloo

Skip the "Antinomian Heresy"

Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2012

Verified Purchase

Ironically, it is NOT the science that bothers me in this book. It is the Protestant (not Christian) theology. Evangelical Protestantisms' "everything is permissible for me" will be the destruction of the United States, as well as the planet, if we do not change our course. Whether it is "pre-emptive wars" that violate the requirements of the Just War Theory, or the Antinomian Heresy of "Salvation by Faith Alone" (nowhere found in the New Testament)which allows the rationalization of irresponsible individualism, this ideology will be our ruin. I actually recommend this book to young Catholics for its science content. I just tell them to ignore the heretical theology! Update: it seems Dr. Hayhoe's book is being steeply discounted. No doubt she is being "deep-sixed" by her fellow evangelicals, who are big into climate change denial. So sad that a good little CATHOLIC boy like me has to be the one to say good things about her book(or,at least, the section of the book SHE wrote). I'll try to drum up some more sales from my Catholic friends!

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

M. Glass

Straightforward and easy to read

Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2013

Verified Purchase

Responds to many of the questions and misconceptions about climate change. I found it to be well written with good explanations of the science parts that anyone can understand, with a section of 30 Figures at the center of the book for visual effect. It is written with a faith-based focus that helps with responding to questions coming from that perspective. At the back of the book is a section for further reading, discussion questions, and 38 pages of sources.

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Wayne Robinson

A novel take on climate change.

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2010

Verified Purchase

The National Centre for Science Education, on its website, requests donations of items for its library and resources, including this book "A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions" (why they want it is a question I don't know the answer to; they also want Willian Dembski's book "The End of Christianity").

While I was purchasing this book for the NCSE, I decided to also buy a Kindle version for myself, to see what the authors' take on climate change is.

It starts off well, with an evocative description of the effects climate change are having on the Inuit. I was a little bemused that it actually even mentions the question whether the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, or whether God just created it 10,000 years ago to look old (with also the current ice age apparently lasting 3 million years, including 50 or so glaciations and 50 or so interglacial periods-including the current one we are living in) and the constant quotation of Scripture to justify their views.

I give it 3 stars; worth reading, but not worth reading again. It's a bit better than Ian Plimer's "Heaven and Earth", which I gave 2 stars (which in my rating system means that I found it difficult to finish), because it was badly written and grossly inaccurate in the science (see my review of it for examples; I initially was highlighting all the errors in it until the memory on my iPad for highlights gave out less than a third of the way into the book, and the Kindle App kept on crashing).

At least "A Climate for Change" doesn't have the same number of science errors (but only because it's actually 'science light'). Not that it isn't capable of making mistakes; for example, "As coral grows, it absorbs one of two kinds of oxygen, standard or deuterium, from the seawater". Actually, deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen, with one neutron in addition to its one proton. I know what they meant to write; with warming corals take up more Oxygen 18 (with 2 extra neutrons) than the standard Oxygen 16, because with a warming sea, more of the lighter water with O16 evaporates, leaving more of the heavier water with O18 (that's the way heavy water with deuterium was made; slowly heating and evaporating much of a very large volume of ordinary water to leave more concentrated D2O behind).

It also makes other errors. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists hasn't changed their position on anthropogenic climate change, as the authors claim they did in 2008. After noting that extreme weather conditions can't be used to support the idea of climate change, they then proceed to do that. Katrina was disastrous because the levees were structurally unsound, wetlands surrounding New Orleans had disappeared removing the buffer to storms and building had occurred in the wrong places. The disastrous bush-fires in Victoria Australia in 2009 were largely due to the neglect of basic preventative control burns in preceding years (Australian trees drop a lot of branches throughout the year, leaving a lot of highly combustible ground tinder, which eventually will have to catch fire, either in a controlled burn in the cooler seasons, or at the height of a hot Summer), and also due to people building in dangerous, but very scenic, bush settings.

I find it very annoying that debate on climate change has become very polarised, with almost religious fervour demonstrated on both sides.

I wish we could all come to some sort of agreement as to what is known about climate, what is speculative and what is just wrong.

My list of facts would include:

Climate is very complex. There are many influences, including solar output, slight orbital changes of the Earth (the Milankovitch cycles), the distribution of the continents with tectonic plate movement, aerosols in the atmosphere from volcanos and industry, changes in cloud cover and changes in albedo of the Earth (including carbon soot darkening snow and ice increasing absorption of heat). And changes in greenhouse gases. Some are cooling. Some are warming.

The Earth has been both hotter and colder in the past, at various times. The causes for climate change then might not be the same for all, and not the same as now. The past only provides information as to how quickly climate can change.

Computer climate models are likely to be inaccurate in predicting the future. Actually, all they do is make projections, based on assumptions as to how we are going to act in the future, giving ball park estimates to give some idea as to what might possibly happen. There's no certainty.

I find it distressing that climate change skeptics don't apply the same skepticism to their own arguments. I have often heard it claimed that increasing cloud cover as a result of any climate warming will largely negate the warming (it begs the question as to what the effect reduced sunlight will have on our agricultural crops).

My take on climate change is; 1. Do we have enough evidence to justify taking action? 2. If not, are there any other reasons for taking action?

My personal worry is actually resource depletion. There currently are no large untapped reserves of oil available. Present reserves of oil might last another 50 years. There might be large reserves under the Arctic Ocean, but there is no current technology to exploit them (unless warming is much larger than expected, there will always be sea ice in the Arctic, and pack ice driven by wind and current against ocean oil rigs will be like the irresistible force coming up against the immovable-by us-object). Energy shortages will only increase; there are currently 1.5 billion people who currently without any electricity. If nothing else, justice demands that they should get at least some minimum amount of the abundant energy we currently enjoy.

Of course we need the right plan, which I concede will be very difficult.

Making biofuels from crops grown on valuable farm land is a very bad idea (particularly since there is minimal if any net gain of energy).

I also think carbon sequestration in coal fired power plants is a bad idea too, although I think coal should be phased out. The term 'clean coal' is an oxymoron. As the authors point out, coal contains trace amounts of heavy metals, but because so much coal is burned, the trace amounts become significant. Fluorescent light globes, because they reduce the energy required, reduce mercury pollution generated from the coal (and LCD lights would be even more effective) outweighing any possible exposure from the mercury in the bulbs (which anyway are sealed). A coal powered plant generates more radioactive pollution than a similarly sized nuclear plant, due to the trace amounts of radioactive metals in coal.

Everything should be on the table; including nuclear (unfortunately Clinton/Gore canned development of the 4th generation nuclear reactor in 1994; it promised to be able to use the waste from the current 2nd generation reactors and solve the waste problem to manageable proportions. Whether it would have been viable is unknown).

So we need alternate energy sources, energy efficiency and energy conservation. We need to live more intelligently and sustainably, and be happy with what we have. We are going to have to make some adjustments anyway; inevitably the price of oil will increase, so we will need to mitigate (decarbonise the economy) for economic if not global warming reasons.

45 people found this helpful

Helpful

Sophia Lanza

Useful and easy to read

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2013

Verified Purchase

If you are a Christian who is having trouble coming to grips with the facts of global warming then this is the book for you. If you are a Christian who is well aware of the realties of global warming and you want to know what actions you can take to help the world then this is the book for you. If you are a non-believer who needs a little nudging then this is the book for you!

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

John Dorner

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on October 26, 2014

Verified Purchase

Excellent book.

One person found this helpful

Jay

This book is extremely disappointing! The section dealing with ...

Reviewed in Canada on June 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

This book is extremely disappointing! The section dealing with the science of climate change was very superficial and extraordinarily dogmatic. The authors' continued reliance on the thoroughly discredited hockey stick casts serious doubt on the remainder of the analysis and the complete failure of the models to predict the future correctly is not even mentioned. I felt that I should access this book because of the recent publicity one of the authors has been receiving, but I remain utterly unconvinced by the case made.

See more reviews

Image Unavailable

Follow the author

A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions Paperback – Bargain Price, March 21, 2011

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Katharine Hayhoe

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries