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

Tadeusz W Patzek

Since 2020, global politics have shifted dramatically to the right—most notably in Europe and the United States. By 2024, this rightward turn in the U.S. reached its culmination with the open denial of climate change, the defunding of clean energy initiatives, and a wholesale dismissal of science—especially climate science. Key domestic and international institutions such as NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Weather Bureau, EPA, USDA, FDA, and even the United Nations have been undermined or defunded. Sophisticated anti-climate propaganda campaigns now flood the media, deliberately sowing confusion and mistrust. Hard-won environmental protections that have improved the health and well-being of millions are being dismantled. What we are witnessing is a resurgence of primitive, brutal, and extractive capitalism—dragging us back to the political and moral conditions of the mid-nineteenth century.

In this context, a book like this one is much needed. The purpose of this book is to present, in clear and compelling graphical form, how humanity’s insatiable thirst for power—measured as work per unit time and fueled overwhelmingly by fossil energy—drives global warming in direct proportion to the total 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 simple: if we use less power, more carefully and sparingly, we emit less—and slow the rise of global temperatures.

Today, 8 billion humans collectively consume continuous —mostly fossil—power equivalent to what would be generated by 260 billion human laborers—a scale of energy use that defies comprehension. Our cumulative CO2 emissions from agriculture and land-use change alone now exceed the methane—and eventual CO2—emitted by the most violent volcanic events of the past 60 million years. Soon, our total carbon emissions will exceed by a factor of four those released by the Chicxulub asteroid impact that ended the Cretaceous and wiped out the dinosaurs. In short, those of us living in industrialized societies must begin using less of everything—now.

One chapter of this book is devoted to climate change denialism, tracing its origins to the earliest days of climate science and systematically debunking the myths that have shaped public confusion and policy inaction for decades.
The simple, quantitative linkage between climate change and cumulative CO2 emissions from energy use—long buried under thousands of pages in IPCC reports and tens of thousands of academic papers—is laid bare here in under 300 pages. This book confronts the central problem: humanity’s cognitive failure to grasp what we have done and change course fast enough to slow the unfolding disaster. At the same time, by making this linkage plain, the book opens the door to effective—and often profitable—strategies for reducing emissions by at least one quarter, just to get started.

Most of this book requires only basic algebra and introductory statistics, making it accessible to a wide audience. The sections on climate science delve deeper—drawing on calculus and advanced physics for those who wish to understand the origins of the governing equations—but this level of depth is not required 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 fields, and liberal arts, as well as graduate students and professionals across disciplines.

The book was written with an international audience in mind—readers 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 body of knowledge—often buried beneath layers of nested complexity in IPCC reports and scientific literature—into clear, accessible language. Even experts often lack the time or patience to decode what dozens of authors and editors actually meant. This book solves that problem by making essential climate science comprehensible without oversimplifying it.