FRONT MATTER
Disclosures
By Dr. David E. Hailey, Copyright David E. Hailey, July 4, 2026. Published by Interactive Media Research Laboratory as a continuous-edition, book-length hypertext.
This is an organic book focused on a constantly changing subject and will change as conditions change.
All content by the author is available for use by others with appropriate attribution.
Content by others and used by the author is available to the extent allowed by the original creator.
This book is entirely non-profit, used for informational and instructional purposes and claims fair use protection for the use of images or charts on public display. However, if any original creator objects to the use of an image, notify us, and it will be immediately removed.
At 83, I’m an old guy, long past my “use by” date. But I’ve been dealing with sustainability questions for my entire adult life. I began writing about it professionally in 1983, when I worked as a technical communicator for heavy industry publications. At the time, we were looking for paths that lead to reducing the industry's consumption of irreplaceable minerals. Believe it or not, heavy industry has been working out how to recycle construction materials since the 1960s.
In 1990, I received my master’s degree in nonfiction, and in 1994 my Ph.D. in critical theory. Finally, in 2022 and 2023, I studied toward a Post-Graduate Professional Certification in Sustainability at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the end of that year of study, I became an MIT Certified Sustainability Science Writer.
MY PUBLICATIONS
In brief, I write about technology and science, with a specific interest in sustainability. We technology writers do a particular kind of work: we stand between scientists and engineers on one side and the public on the other, and we translate complex ideas for the general public. We make complex systems understandable. That’s what I’m doing here. I’m not the scientist inventing the breakthroughs that will save humanity; I’m the person watching that scientist work, asking questions, and reporting the results to you ... giving you the chance to see which of those ideas might fit into your own lifestyle.
This is dedicated to my wife, Chris, who stood with me through more than 20 years of my mood swings while I stared into the face of impending climate change.
MyBMW330dxi=gone Why did I write this?
If I were to ask you whether you thought a book about climate change is a good idea, I expect that you would say, “Of course!” “But,” you might ask. “Why a website? Who on earth would ever read a book-length website?”
Of course, I can think of nobody who would read a book-length website. My readers (my audience) will be looking for the answers to the question, “What can I do?” . . . and that is the point of this book: to answer that question. Unfortunately, the answer to that question is different for each of us. We are each following different paths, and we will each pick a different path into a sustainable future. This book embraces that truth and explores and describes a huge variety of paths.
Moreover, there is nothing stationary about climate change. Conditions, paths, and processes are in a constant state of change, and a book dealing with these topics must, necessarily change with them. Only hypertexts are able to quickly make changes over time, and only a hypermedia book is sufficiently expansive to handle the complexities of simulations, animations, and real-time communication. And that brings us to the World Wide Web, the only place capable of hosting such a book and making it publicly available to everyone. And if you cannot find your answer here, there is a blog where you can ask questions and get answers from a group of researchers. MORE
As an independent science writer, I work without the institutional support typically necessary for complex nonfiction projects. I have no research assistants, no subject matter experts, no in house editors, and no fact checking department. To compensate, I rely on Microsoft Copilot as a multi role colleague throughout the development of this book.
More specifically, I used Copilot in five distinct ways:
1. Concept Development and Brainstorming I use Copilot as a thinking partner to explore large, interdisciplinary ideas such as climate systems, evolutionary psychology, energy transitions, and communication theory.
2. Resource Identification Copilot assists in locating relevant scientific literature, historical sources, technical documentation, and policy references. This allows me to quickly expand the scope of my research beyond what a single writer could gather alone within a reasonable timeline.
3. Fact Checking and Verification Every claim in this book is subjected to a fact checking pass using Copilot’s search and synthesis capabilities. This includes verifying scientific statements, historical timelines, policy details, and technical descriptions.
4. Copyediting and Proofreading Copilot provides line level editing, clarity improvements, structural suggestions, and consistency checks. It functiones as a combined copyeditor and proofreader, helping refine the prose to publication quality.
Help with improving code Although I can design and code using HTML, CSS, and JS, it is helpful to have Copilot look at my code with an eye toward suggesting smoother and more elegant coding. Moreover, I do not always know the exact code. Many times, I began a sentence to Copilot with, "In HTML, how do I ..."
In the end, AI becomes as much a proofreader, spellchecker, copyeditor, and fact checker for my code as for my copy.
Although I often read comments from writers saying they would never use an AI bot for any purpose, I have found that using AI helps me with my research and for monitoring the quality of my writing to be immensely helpful
In short, I believe that writers who learn how to use AI effectively in their writing, will be poised to enter the next generation of publication with stronger communication skills. I believe that writers who deride the use of AI as cheating, can be compared to monks deriding people who worked with printing presses as “printer’s devils.
WHERE WE ARE AND HOW WE GOT HERE
Introduction
A detailed examination of the evidence shows that data collected through the decades are easy to see and understand. The climate has been changing since 1889, and that change has only accelerated over time.
More than a dozen international agencies have been doing this research for the past ~75 years, and they are all in agreement.
Some of these agencies (e.g., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) claim to be able to produce the average temperature of the entire Earth, every day, having done so for the past 25 years. It is worth asking the question, “Can they really do that, and if so, how?” I answer that question in the first paragraphs of the introduction. INTRODUCTION PART 1: Can Research Agencies Really do that?
How long has NASA been telling us the climate is changing? NASA first publicly warned the Senate that researchers could see global warming in 1988. This problem, and all of its evidence has been available to the public since 1988. All we have to do is look. We can even use publicly available numbers and make our own charts. The numbers don’t lie. Ironically, we were told in 1988, but the climate has been changing since 1888. . . . MORE ON THIS . . .
We have done this before … a dozen or more times. Through the centuries, we have damaged the Earth, often disastrously, but we have also shown that we can repair the damage, and it’s always involved the same pattern: corporations choosing to behave badly no matter what the consequence, with some government officials throwing in with them because of ideology, ego, or greed. Sometimes the government works against our needs, but it usually works for the greater good. . . . MORE ON THIS . . .
Climatic History of the Earth
Given that more than 99% of all species ever to live on Earth are now extinct, we have the good fortune of being among the lucky few survivors of five-billion years of repeated carnage. No one needs to be told that the Earth began as an inhospitable fireball, but that it evolved into a hospitable planet that almost immediately (in geologic time) bloomed into abundant life. Fewer people know that the period of abundant life was followed by “Snowball Earth,” and that life on Earth barely hung on.