How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

A commonly used climate-economy model indicates the break-even year (when the optimal policy would begin to produce net economic benefit) for mitigation efforts launched in the early 2020s would be only around 2080. Should average global life expectancy (about 72 years in 2020) remain the same, then the generation born near the middle of the 21st c

the preparation of modern cement was patented only in 1824 by Joseph Aspdin, an English bricklayer. His

The best account of recent nitrogen flows in China’s agriculture shows that about 60 percent of the nutrient available to the country’s crops comes from synthetic ammonia: feeding three out of five of the Chinese population thus depends on the synthesis of this compound.[23] The corresponding global mean is about 50 percent. This dependence easily

70 percent of wasted food was perfectly edible and was not consumed either because it spoiled or because too much of it was served.

CO2 (in the atmosphere). Anytime a plant opens its stomata (located on the underside of leaves) to import sufficient carbon for its photosynthesis, it loses large amounts of water.

And hydrocarbons have yet another indispensable non-fuel use: as feedstocks for many different chemical syntheses (dominated by ethane, propane, and butane from natural gas liquids) producing a variety of synthetic fibers, resins, adhesives, dyes, paints and coatings, detergents, and pesticides, all vital in myriad ways to our modern world.[40] Giv

Using modern scientific units, 1 joule is the force of 1 newton—that is, the mass of 1 kilogram accelerated by 1 m/s2 acting over a distance of 1 meter.[27] But this definition refers only to kinetic (mechanical) energy, and it certainly does not provide an intuitive understanding of energy in all of its forms.

1 joule is the force of 1 newton—that is, the mass of 1 kilogram accelerated by 1 m/s2 acting over a distance of 1 meter.[27]

Perhaps the best example of a natural risk that would not directly kill anybody, but that would cause enormous planet-wide disruptions resulting in a large number of indirect casualties, is the possibility of a catastrophic geomagnetic storm caused by a coronal mass ejection.[73] The corona is the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere (it can be

The list of these critical biospheric boundaries includes nine categories: climate change (now interchangeably, albeit inaccurately, called simply global warming), ocean acidification (endangering marine organisms that build structures of calcium carbonate), depletion of stratospheric ozone (shielding the Earth from excessive ultraviolet radiation