Thermal Power and Climate Change: A Data-Driven Analysis of Cause and Effect, 1800-2100

Since 2020, global politics have shifted sharply to the right—nowhere more visibly than in the United States and Europe. By 2024, this rightward turn in the U.S. culminated in open climate-change denial, the defunding of clean-energy initiatives, and a widespread rejection of scientific evidence. Major domestic and international institutions—NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Weather Bureau, EPA, USDA, FDA, and even the United Nations—have been weakened, sidelined, or defunded. Meanwhile, sophisticated anti-climate propaganda campaigns saturate the media, deliberately sowing confusion and mistrust. Hard-won environmental protections that improved public health and ecological stability are being dismantled. What we are witnessing is a re-emergence of primitive, extractive capitalism, dragging society back toward the political and moral conditions of the mid-nineteenth century. We start from an in-depth analysis of the unfathomable rise of artificial intelligence (AI) that will shape the fate of every system—natural and human-made—on Earth. Given the extraordinary acceleration of AI-driven infrastructures now embedded in economic, military, and governance systems essential to human survival, it is no longer implausible that AI will begin making, or coercing, the strategic decisions nominally attributed to governments in the United States, China, the EU-27, Russia, and increasingly India. Those decisions may result in a rapid, deliberate culling of human populations in the developed world—executed through pandemics, the denial of basic healthcare, systematic disruption of water and food supplies, denial of disaster aid, and the degradation or selective collapse of non-AI-controlled electric grids. Under such a scenario, human emissions would decline precipitously. The climate breakdown would “resolve itself” over the next one to two centuries, while increasingly autonomous AI assumes control over whatever remains of humankind and of the biosphere. We follow with an outline of humanity's true place in Nature and our genetic and physiological dependence on deep geological time, extending back more than 3.6 billion years. We illustrate how our collective learning as a species has been fundamentally subverted by the rise of modern techno-civilization, which has progressively severed most people from their biological and social roles and immersed them in a technological enframing that distorts perception, erodes meaning, and obscures what it means to be human. The global carbon cycle on Earth is framed as the inner workings of a vast far-from-equilibrium system that continually dissipates the high-energy photons intercepted from the Sun. Life itself is an intrinsic and essential component of this planetary dissipation. Over the past 3 billion years, the coupled dynamics of plate tectonics, volcanism, and life have governed Earth's climate and maintained its long-term habitability. The human perturbation of the global carbon cycle is modest in magnitude compared with several natural fluxes, yet it strikes directly at the biosphere - where it inflicts a disproportionate harm on the stability of the climate system. This pivotal chapter establishes the interwoven narrative of our book. Given this background, the need for a book like this one could not be more urgent. Its purpose is to present, in clear and compelling graphical form, how humanity’s short-term goals coupled with insatiable demand for power—work per unit time, still supplied overwhelmingly by fossil fuels—drives global warming in almost direct proportion to the cumulative emissions of CO₂, methane, and other greenhouse gases. Among these, CO₂ plays a disproportionately large role in determining the effective slope of this relationship. The logic is straightforward: if we use less power—more carefully and sparingly—we emit less, and thus slow the rise of global temperatures. Otherwise, the ever-more powerful AI control systems will make us cut emissions to protect the stability of their power infrastructure at our cost. Today, 8 billion people collectively consume continuous power—mostly fossil—equivalent to the output of roughly 260 billion human laborers, a scale of energy use that defies intuition. Cumulative CO₂ emissions from agriculture and land-use change alone now exceed the methane (and eventual CO₂) released by the most violent volcanic events of the past 60 million years. Soon, total anthropogenic carbon emissions will surpass by a factor of four those injected into the atmosphere by the Chicxulub asteroid impact that ended the Cretaceous and wiped out the dinosaurs. In short, industrialized societies must begin using less of everything—now. One chapter of this book is devoted to the long history of climate-change denial, tracing its origins to the earliest days of climate science and systematically dismantling the myths that have sustained public confusion and policy paralysis for decades. The simple, quantitative linkage between cumulative emissions and global temperature—long buried beneath thousands of pages of IPCC reports and tens of thousands of scientific papers—is laid bare here in under 300 pages. The book confronts the central problem: humanity’s cognitive failure to understand what we have done, and to change course rapidly enough to slow the unfolding disaster. Yet by clarifying the physics and mathematics that underpin climate change, the book also points toward effective—and often profitable—strategies for reducing emissions by at least one quarter as an essential starting point. Most chapters require only basic algebra and introductory statistics, making the material accessible to a wide audience. The sections that delve more deeply into climate science draw on calculus and advanced physics for readers who wish to understand the derivation of the governing equations, though this level of detail is not necessary to grasp the core insights. As a result, the book is well-suited for advanced high-school students (e.g., AP level), undergraduates in engineering, science, biomedical disciplines, and the liberal arts, as well as graduate students and professionals across fields. It was written for an international readership, including audiences in France, the UK, Germany, Poland, Russia, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and beyond. (My earlier collaboration with Joseph Tainter was translated into Italian.) Finally, this book will be especially valuable to policymakers. It distills an immense and often inaccessible body of knowledge—spread across IPCC assessments, specialized computer science, and other scientific literature—into clear, concise language. Even experts frequently lack the time to decipher what dozens of authors and editors intended. This book solves that problem by making essential climate science comprehensible without oversimplifying it.