Climate Change: A Wicked Problem—Complexity and Uncertainty at the Intersection of Science, Economics, Politics, and Human Behavior, Frank P.Incropera, Cambridge U. Press, 2016. $29.99 paper (364 pp.). ISBN 978-1-107-52113-1 Buy at Amazon

The Renaissance of Renewable Energy, Gian AndreaPagnoni and StephenRoche, Cambridge U. Press, 2015. $29.99 paper (294 pp.). ISBN 978-1-107-69836-9 Buy at Amazon

Before discussing two new books that address climate change and mitigation, we would do well to understand what their titles mean. “Wicked” in Frank Incropera’s Climate Change: A Wicked Problem—Complexity and Uncertainty at the Intersection of Science, Economics, Politics, and Human Behavior refers to a problem whose definition is elusive and for which a definitive solution may be lacking. And “renewable energy” in Gian Andrea Pagnoni and Stephen Roche’s The Renaissance of Renewable Energy refers to solar and wind energy. Along with nuclear energy, which is not discussed in their book, solar and wind are the options that could replace fossil fuels as they are phased out in efforts to avert climate change.

Climate Change: A Wicked Problem is a decent introduction for high school students or university nonscience majors. But it doesn’t provide physics-savvy readers with an appreciation of how and why human-induced climate change evolved in recent years from a “wicked” problem to a well-defined one. The worldwide consensus, adopted at the 2015 UN talks in Paris, is to keep global-mean warming below 2 °C. We are currently far off track.

Incropera’s book lacks basic theory, for example, a discussion of how the carbon cycle and models of it link carbon dioxide emissions to climate change. Connecting those dots is important. Climate Change: A Wicked Problem does strive to give a balanced account of the climate-science issues, but unfortunately it is not deep enough. The author discusses the arguments of the consensus and of climate change deniers more as a set of assertions than as science-based analysis. For an engaging and accurate analysis of Earth’s carbon cycle in relation to climate change, read Tyler Volk’s CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge (MIT Press, 2008).

Unfortunately, Incropera neglects to make clear why the scientific community has reached an overwhelming consensus that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities. That’s the official position of 97% of publishing climate scientists and all the world’s academies of science; statements from professional and governmental bodies can be found under “scientific consensus” on NASA’s Global Climate Change website. A good summary of the scientific evidence can be found in the joint report Climate Change: Evidence and Causes, from the UK Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences. And an excellent text for serious physicists is Principles of Planetary Climate by Raymond Pierrehumbert (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

The case for phasing out fossil fuels and immediately phasing in non-CO2-emitting energy sources is strongly supported by findings in the peer-reviewed literature. Pierrehumbert argues as much in his October 2014 Slate.com essay, “Climate science is settled enough,” a devastating rebuttal to Steve Koonin’s September 2014 op-ed “Climate science is not settled,” published in the Wall Street Journal. At the time, the American Physical Society was reviewing its policy statement on climate change; for a while, Koonin had a hand in the process, which, Pierrehumbert writes, was “described [to me] as a show trial” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Renaissance of Renewable Energy might also be a decent choice for an energy course for nonscience majors. The first half, chapters 1–4, asks such questions as What is energy? Where does it come from? and How is it produced? However, in my opinion, this book, too, is not meaty enough for physicists, engineers, or serious policy wonks who want to understand the current state of the art of renewable energy conversion and its enabling technologies.

The book’s second half, chapters 5–7, raises some important issues: Chapter 5 looks at the politics and economics of energy, chapter 6 discusses the price of energy consumption, and chapter 7, “Energy from my backyard,” delves into such issues as energy produced by rooftop solar panels.

Identifying outstanding energy-physics problems that need solving to implement a 2 °C cap on global warming requires integrated assessments of energy technology evolution paths, economics, the global carbon cycle, and climate change, similar in principle to integrated assessment models employed in the IPCC reports. Those models and independent analyses show that it will be necessary to phase out most fossil-fuel energy-generating technologies over the next 50 years to stay below the two-degree warming cap. An excellent text on transition paths to renewable energy—written from a physics perspective, and intended for those not filled with fear and loathing of math—is David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air (Cambridge University Press, 2009). A revenue-neutral carbon tax such as the one proposed by climate scientist James Hansen may be a reasonable way to pay for the needed rapid transition to renewables.

Like one of the authors (Pagnoni), I own solar photovoltaic panels; they are installed on the roof of my home in Central Florida. Indeed, the cost to consumers of solar panels has been driven down markedly in recent years, particularly by increased production in China and by tax incentives in the US. Before I retired, I had already taught many courses on climate and renewable energy, but I was still unsure in my gut whether it would be possible to maintain a middle-class carbon-neutral lifestyle electrically in the US with essentially no emissions. Most scientists are like Richard Feynman, who once quipped that he didn’t believe results in his gut unless he had derived or measured them at least two different ways.

My wife and I have been keeping performance data for our panels in the form of kilowatt-hours generated per day and comparing that number to our total daily residential electricity usage, which includes operating two electric vehicles. It became clear within a year that we’re generating more than we use. The excess is “banked” to the local utility through net metering, by which the meters run backward when supply exceeds demand.

For intermittent renewables like solar and wind, the 500-pound gorilla in the room is energy storage. Many options are on the table, including lithium-ion batteries, flow batteries, and compressed-air storage. The ARPA–E division of the US Department of Energy recently claimed breakthroughs in battery-storage technologies, but there are few reliable data.

The leading edge of climate change is upon us: Every day we hear news of melting sea ice, tundra, glaciers, and polar ice sheets; sea-level rise; floods; droughts; and loss of species diversity. The ethical problem is that the worst impacts come generations later, as discussed in Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren (Bloomsbury, 2009). And yet, the energy transition needed to get sustainable power to run high-tech civilization has to be designed by this generation of scientists and engineers if it is to come in time to stave off disaster. The Obama administration and many savvy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are on board. But we also need smart physicists and engineers plugged into the real climate and energy problems. Let’s give them intellectually deep enough and up-to-date reference tools to bring them up to speed on climate change and energy.

Marty Hoffert is an emeritus professor of physics and former chair of the department of applied science at New York University. He has published broadly in fluid mechanics, plasma physics, oceanography, planetary atmospheres, climate change, solar and wind energy, and space-based solar power.