Tatiana Schlossberg

Sometimes it feels hard to remember that Silicon Valley is an actual place, a collage of parched suburbs, and not just the collective noun for information-technology companies.

Scientists have suggested that some whale deaths could be a result of marine noise, often a result of military activity, offshore drilling or exploration, which can disorient the animals and send them in the wrong direction, possibly toward beaches where they get stuck instead of into the deeper ocean.

I've never met a detail I didn't like.

Climate change is not a distant problem. It's involved in all of our lives through the stuff that we use, buy and eat - which is not to say that individuals like you and me are responsible for climate change.

Coal is used to generate power almost everywhere, but problems associated with coal ash and coal ash slurry disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities, experts say.

Plastic debris in the ocean was thought to accumulate in big patches, mostly in subtropical gyres - big currents that converge in the middle of the ocean - but scientists estimate that only about 1 percent of plastic pollution is in these gyres and other surface waters in the open ocean.

I'm a journalist, not an advocate, so I approached researching and writing the book the same way that I do any other reporting. But when you're writing for yourself, you have a little more room to say what you think.

Unlike the visible and heavily regulated airborne emissions from power plant smokestacks, coal ash is largely unseen unless there is a major spill and, until recently, far less effectively regulated.

The ocean is loud: Ship propellers, sonar, oil and gas drilling and other industrial work make sounds, even if, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, no one can hear it.

Textile manufacturers use complicated chemical and industrial processes to make clothing materials, from cotton to synthetic fibers. And while the environmental consequences aren't always clear, consumption is growing.

Most viscose rayon is made from wood pulp, but the process of making it typically uses so many chemicals in such vast quantities that some experts said it shouldn't really count as a natural plant fiber.

When whales die, their bodies sink to the bottom of the ocean and over time become part of the marine sediment layer, where they can sequester the carbon dioxide they have accumulated during their life span, an average of 33 tons for a great whale species, keeping it out of the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.

Humpback whales - which can be as long as 60 feet, weigh as much as 40 tons and can live for 50 years - are found in all of the world's oceans.

Health care in the United States is responsible for a tremendous amount of waste and a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions. For every hospital bed, the American health care system produces about 30 pounds of waste every day; over all, it accounts for about 10 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions.

Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you've generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.

Knowing how much carbon dioxide the ocean is storing is crucial to modeling future climate changes, and given the prevalence of these creatures around the world and how much water they can filter, it is likely a significant amount.

As we burn fossil fuels, we release carbon dioxide, much of which is absorbed by the oceans.

Climate change makes machine learning that much more valuable, too: So much of the data available to scientists is not necessarily accurate anymore, as animals move their habitats, temperatures rise and currents shift. As species move, managing populations becomes even more critical.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence applications are proving to be especially useful in the ocean, where there is both so much data - big surfaces, deep depths - and not enough data - it is too expensive and not necessarily useful to collect samples of any kind from all over.

The coronavirus pandemic and fears about its spread have brought to a screeching halt years of efforts to get Americans to do one small thing: bring their own bags to the grocery store and stop using plastic ones.

Cargo ships typically burn dirty fuel that releases pollutants like nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide, which can cause various cancers and childhood asthma for people living in port cities.

When ships reduce their speed they use less fuel, resulting in fewer greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants; the global shipping industry accounts for nearly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

During fire season and heat waves, power can go out or electric utilities may shut off power to avoid sparking fires or creating systemwide blackouts, both of which mean that hospitals have to run on their generators.

As climate change moves from a model of the future to the reality of the present, health care systems across the country are facing a difficult set of questions. What are doctors supposed to do when wildfires, rising floodwater or other natural disasters threaten their ability to provide care for patients?

The Japanese people, though largely united in recognizing the threat of global warming and rising sea levels, are likely to face hurdles in reforming their energy policy, including some resistance from young people who say the nation faces more pressing problems, like the economy.

I think people who speak and write about climate change and environmental degradation need to convey how interesting and important this topic is, because I'm not sure people will feel empowered to help if they don't feel engaged and called to action.

I think it is important to communicate how serious climate change is - it would be a disservice not to. But I'm not sure that emphasizing how scared we should all be is the best way to get people to care - I know it makes me want to crawl into a dark hole and never come out.

I learned about coal ash, which is the byproduct of burning coal for electricity. It is one of the largest solid industrial waste streams in the country, and it contains harmful substances like arsenic, lead, mercury and more, and because of how it is stored, pollutes groundwater and drinking water all over the country.

I was really surprised to learn that there is no food date label standardization, which contributes significantly to why we waste so much food, which generates methane emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas, in landfill, and means that we are using lots of land, water, fertilizer and energy to produce food that no one eats.

I know that I come from a position of privilege and that my impact on the environment is much bigger than lots of other people who can't consume in the way that I have been able to.

The fact that communities that are relatively powerless often are exposed to more dangerous pollution and the worst effects of climate change: a society like that is one that is less free and less equal for everybody.

I don't think I could have - and I wouldn't have wanted to - write a book about climate change that wasn't about justice and equality.

I'm very lucky that I got to spend my summers at my grandmother's house on Martha's Vineyard. My brother really loved fishing, and he spent a lot of summers working on a charter fishing boat.

I've taken for granted that we have clean air to breathe in cities, relatively speaking, and most people have access to clean water. But we can't take these things for granted.