About

Scott Denning is a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, where he has taught since 1998. He studies how the atmosphere and living things on land trade energy, water and carbon dioxide, and how the global carbon cycle works. He earned a BA in geology at the University of Maine and an MS and PhD in atmospheric science at Colorado State, in 1993 and 1994.

He has taught climate change to undergraduates for about twenty years: at Colorado State, as a visiting professor at the Yale School of the Environment, and aboard Semester at Sea's floating classroom. He has given hundreds of talks to audiences of every kind, including ones that doubt climate change is a problem at all. In 2022 the American Geophysical Union gave him its Climate Communication Prize.

This book grew out of a course. I've been teaching climate change to undergraduates for about twenty years: at Colorado State University, at Yale, and on Semester at Sea, teaching from a ship as it sails around the world. Generations of students from every field of study have taken it: future scientists and engineers, but also economists, historians, poets and pre-meds.

Over those years my students have changed. They used to be curious and occasionally dismissive. Now they arrive scared, steeped in climate gloom since primary school. The course I built answers that with evidence, storytelling and a lot of human connection. This book is my attempt to bottle it, so that students and teachers I'll never meet can have the kind of learning experience my own students have had.

"Solvable" isn't a forecast. It means we can, and if we must, then we will.

I wrote this book with a great deal of help from artificial intelligence, and you deserve to know how. The ideas, the arguments, the stories and the voice come from my lectures, slides, problem sets and earlier drafts, built up over two decades of teaching. I used AI tools, chiefly Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex, to help turn that material into a book. I read, revised and approved every change before it went into the book, and I'm responsible for every word.

The book's text and figures are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: you may copy, share, adapt and build on them, for any purpose, as long as you give credit. The models' code is under the MIT licence. Photos by other people keep their own terms, listed below and in the book's captions.