Humanity's Moment: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope

A climate scientist, Girgis served as a lead author for the Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But Humanity’s Moment is not another dry recitation of the damage greenhouse-gas emissions are doing to our planet. Girgis intersperses the science with her personal experience of what it is like to live through what seemed to her like the start of the apocalypse: the hot, dry summer of 2019, when Australia’s ancient Gondwana rainforests burst into flames. Girgis had spent her life retreating to these forests – hitherto too wet to burn – when she needed a break from the stress of her work. But our failure to heed the warnings that she and other scientists had been issuing for decades had led to their destruction.