Climate – Can we beat the Heat?
Alexandra Hamann, Claudia Zea-Schmidt & Reinhold Leinfelder
German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), Berlin. ISBN 978-3-93619-41-7. Translated from the German edition (Berlin, 2013) by Bob Culverhouse.
Berlin. 138 pp
A comic explains the WBGU flagship report „World in Transition – A Social Contract for Sustainability“.
Climate change, the Anthropocene, rising CO2 levels, the Earth Summit in Rio, wind turbines, combined heat and power generation, desertification, biodiversity loss, Germany’s Renewable Energy Act, pioneers of change – what do all these terms mean exactly and how are they all linked? This comic offers answers.
The evidence for man-made climate change is overwhelming. Other global environmental changes, such as the loss of biodiversity, are closely linked to climate change and to our customary industrial economic practices. We can stop a global climate catastrophe if engineers, business people and policy-makers all pull together and if all work on the great transformation across national borders.
A major transformation is needed to stop climate change; in other words, we have to learn to live and to produce what we need in sustainable ways. Any transformation of society must begin in people’s minds; only then can it be achieved technically with any chance of economic success. Scientists, politicians and citizens will have to work together to achieve this. In this comic, nine top scientists, the members of WBGU as comic-book heroes, show us that we can beat the heat – and how to do it!
