Tag Archives: Climate

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember – Annalee Newitz ****

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I’m not a natural audience for books about surviving disasters (even though I wrote the Global Warming Survival Kit). I can’t stand disaster movies, because I can’t take the newitzpragmatic ‘Oh well, some survive,’ viewpoint as I watch millions perish. So I thought that I would find this book, with its subtitle How Humans will survive a mass extinction somewhat unappetising – but I was wrong.

The Earth has gone through a number of mass extinctions, where a fair percentage of living species have been killed off. The most famous is the one that mostly took out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago, but there have been others and, Annalee Newitz points out, if we want to see the long term survival of the human race, we need to be able to make it through one, should it turn up, whether caused by climate change, pandemics, a supervolcano or an asteroid.

What Newitz does surprisingly well here is weave together what are really around four different books, all in one compact volume. We start of with palaeontology, looking back over previous mass extinctions, getting a better understanding of what happened, what survived and how it survived. From here we segue into human pre-history and history, drawing lessons from the plight of the Neanderthal and the impact of plague and other pandemics. After this, in a transitional section we see the examples of the three techniques in the book’s title – scattering in the Jewish disaspora, adaptation in cyanobacteria (and how we could use it) and remembering on the part of the gray whale, before taking another transition into a more science-fiction driven view.

Newitz starts by pointing out the potential lessons to be learned from the SF writing of Octavia Butler who is apparently ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest science fiction writers’, which I was a bit surprised by as I read a lot of science fiction and I’ve never heard of her. The segue here is into the shakiest part of the book where it dabbles in futurology. This broadly divides into relatively short term survival approaches and longer term diaspora into space.

One of the reasons this is the weakest part of the book is that Newitz offers us castle-in-the-air solutions with no obvious way (and certainly no hint) of how to get there from where we are now. So she says we will need underground cities if we need to survive some kinds of impact, while we would be helped by building green cities that merge biology and construction… but it’s not clear how we would ever get started on such major, long term projects. She doesn’t address the reality that humans are very bad at taking the long view.

I was, though, pleasantly surprised by this book, particularly the first half. This is genuinely interesting and thought provoking, up to and including the Octavia Butler section. And though it goes a little downhill after that, it never fails to be readable and interesting – just a little far fetched. So congratulations to Newitz on taking the rare long view – and in having optimism for our ability to survive what the universe can throw at us.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Project Sunshine – Steve McKevitt & Tony Ryan ****

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The authors of this important book recognize that energy is the fundamental limiter for human existence and coupled with getting food production right, producing enough clean energy is the most essential step required to keep the world as we know it Screenshot_25_03_2013_13_54going.

It’s a slightly meandering book, taking in population growth, cosmology, world history, fossil fuels, renewables and more. The conclusions are powerful and inevitable. Forget the hydrogen infrastructure beloved of Arnie and Top Gear – it’s expensive and impractical. Yes to wind and all those other good things, but for at least 30 years we need a major increase in nuclear (with particular investment in fusion) combined with a rapidly increasing dependence on solar. This needs to be assembled alongside with effective ways of storing energy, which are more likely to be chemical (e.g. producing methanol from air-based carbon, then burning it) than as batteries.

So a great, really important message, but I found quite a lot of the book irritatingly slow, with far too much history that didn’t really contribute a lot to the argument. There was also a touch of the ‘Gore syndrome ‘ – Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was largely good, but it was let down badly by a couple of factual errors.

All pop science books have a few errors, but when you lay down the law in a polemic fashion you need to be perfect with you core arguments. This book twice makes the plonking statement that ‘all our energy comes from the Sun’. This is blatantly not true, as the book makes plain in describing nuclear, geothermal and tidal energy – none if them dependent on sunlight.

There is also a real mess in the pages dealing with cosmology with some highly dubious numbers on inflation, and a total mix up between dark matter and energy – not crucial but irritating, making me wonder if the authors should have stuck to the science they knew. Overall, though, a very powerful and important title that all politicians should have on their shelves.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Goldilocks Planet – Jan Zalasiewicz & Mark Williams ***

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I don’t know why it is, but for me (and possibly for many general readers), books on earth science tend to be most dull read in all of popular science. I suppose biology is interesting because it’s how we work, and physics and cosmology are interesting because it’s how the universe works… but earth science is saddled with impenetrable names for different periods of time, plenty of climate variations (yawn) and a lot of mud and bits of stone. As someone once said to me, ‘When you’ve seen one stone, you’ve seen them all.’ Of course a geologist would wince at this and start telling us about all the different rock formations, but after five minutes we’d all be asleep, so it wouldn’t really help. Similarly, it’s very difficult to get excited about the history of the climate – it has similar snooze-making capabilities.

This makes writing an accessible book on earth science an uphill struggle, but I think, on the whole Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams have achieved it. The book is subtitled ‘the four billion year story of earth’s climate’ and traces through the different eras and eons and goodness knows what how and why the climate has changed, whether it is to form a snowball (or slushball) or to get excessively hot in modern terms. Despite all these variations, once life got going it seems to have clung on, hence the ‘Goldilocks’ bit. Once the Earth got over its initial formation, it seems to have stuck quite closely to a climate range that made life possible.

After being indoctrinated by the Royal Society of Chemistry, who assure me that the only way to write sulfur is with an ‘f’ these days, I was slightly surprised that the equally erudite OUP went for the ‘sulphur’ spelling, but that apart I certainly couldn’t complain about the science. But the nice surprise was the way the authors managed some engaging storytelling that made the book enjoyable to read. I would be going too far to say that this was a page turner I could put down, but it was much more readable than I thought it would be.

Even so, I can only give it three stars, because in the end the bogeyman of earth science and historical climatology wins over. It does all get a little samey and lacking in interest. The authors do everything they can to keep us with them, but the subject matter still gives them a hard time. Perhaps the best bit is appreciating just how speculative some of the assertions are, based on very indirect assumptions – in this respect it gives cosmology a run for its money.

If you want or need to read about the way the Earth’s climate has changed in history, this is a brilliant book – but if you only have a casual interest, it could be more of a struggle to stay with it.

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Review by Brian Clegg

A World without Ice – Henry Pollack ****

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This book might well have passed me by if it had not been shortlisted for the 2010 Royal Society science book prize. I hope the book receives the exposure it deserves – Henry Pollack gets across well the dangers we face if we do not prevent further global warming and melting of the world’s ice.

We see how, if we are not careful, rising sea levels, caused by the melting of ice sheets, will lead to the flooding of low-lying island nations, and how parts of South America will be without water for drinking and agriculture after the snow and ice on top of the Andes have disappeared. We see how the melting of permafrost will release the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, exacerbating the warming of the planet, and how underwater animal species that rely on sea ice for their development will struggle to survive once the ice is gone, producing knock on effects all the way up food chains.

The book isn’t limited to these discussions, however, and considerable space is also given earlier on to a variety of surrounding topics. In these sections we look at, for instance, what the world was like during past ice ages and how ice has shaped earth’s landscapes historically, and the strength of the consensus among scientists about the extent of future global warming and what have been the main causes of warming in the past.

The author is good at making simple analogies to get across important points. When looking at the causes of global warming in the earlier sections, for example, Pollack discusses the IPCC’s position in 2007 that there is a 90 percent chance that humans are responsible for most of the warming in the second half of last century. Some have seized on the remaining 10 percent to argue that there is uncertainty around the role humans have played. But, as Pollack says, if you were to go into a casino and be told that, for any game you choose, you would be given a 9 out of 10 chance of success, you would feel very confident indeed about going home with a lot of money. There is very little doubt about the extent to which humans have driven climate change, and are accelerating the transition to a world without ice.

Nothing gets in the way of the book’s message – the science is easy to understand and the writing is very approachable. It’s difficult to find anything significantly wrong with the book. I wondered whether it could have spent a little more time on what action we as governments and individuals need to take, given the position we are in – this is dealt with fairly briefly. It could also have been useful to hear directly from individuals in the communities most threatened by rising sea levels and the loss of ice about the specific difficulties in their daily lives they will likely be forced to contend with, and are already dealing with. These human stories would have made the consequences of ice loss seem a little less abstract.

These are small drawbacks, however. All in all, this is a well written book that should alert us to the importance of tackling global warming, and stopping ice loss, urgently.

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Review by Matt Chorley

The Climate Files – Fred Pearce *****

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Books take a long time in production. A typical book will take at least a year to write, then another year from being submitted to the publisher to hitting the shops. So when a book comes out much quicker than this, you have to be a little suspicious of the quality of the content.

The Climate Files has, without doubt, been rushed out. It tells the story of the leak of emails and other materials from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that has proved such fruitful fodder for those who want to attack the idea of a human contribution to global warming. The leak itself happened in November 2009 and we see references to events in March 2010 – but the book came out in June 2010. Quick work indeed.

But to be fair to Fred Pearce, a lot of the content is derived from material he had already amassed for the much quicker turnround of newspaper coverage (this is a Guardian Books title, and the newspaper the Guardian is central to Pearce’s work on this story). More importantly, the book doesn’t bear the signs of a rushed job – it is well structured, readable and doesn’t appear to be scattered with errors and typos (doubly amazing given the Guardian connection).

After a rather unnecessary long list of dramatis personae (I really can’t see why that’s there except that one of the problems of last minute books is you have to pre-guess the page length, and this could be a filler), Pearce plunges us into Phil Jones of the CRU appearing before a House of Commons committee. From there we go into all the elements that built up to the leaking of the emails – the key bits of science, how the scientists and global warming sceptics responded to each other, the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph, the reasons why individuals were sceptics and the approach they took – and much more.

Finally, with the publication of the emails we see exactly how these have been used in an attempt to discredit both CRU and climate science in general. Pearce is fair and balanced throughout. He points out the errors the scientists have made. He shows how doubts over tree ring data have not really come through in the way the science has been presented. He highlights the proprietary approach taken to data that should have been available for checking. And at the same time he shows how information has been distorted by sceptics (particularly sceptical politicians), how the leaked emails totally fail to discredit the evidence for manmade climate change and how the behaviour of scientists has been misrepresented.

I think this is a crucial book because climate science is at a crossroads. After the ‘Climategate’ affair, and the errors on the subject of glacier melting in a recent IPCC report, there is widespread doubt about climate science. What we need is a clear picture of what parts of the science are doubtful and why, and a better idea of the risk attached to various predictions. At the same time we need to get away from the illogical response that just because some scientists behaved stupidly it somehow invalidates climate change science. The Climate Files gives us a unique opportunity not only to understand just what happened with Climategate, but also to get a better understanding of how climate science has worked and how it could be improved. It even gives useful material for discussions on the future of the peer review process. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in the truth and lies of climate change.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Rising Sea – Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young ****

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In the 21st Century, rising global sea levels caused by human induced global warming will more than likely make many island nations and coastal areas around the world uninhabitable, will destroy important ecosystems, and will leave some of our major cities incredibly vulnerable to flooding, storm surges and infrastructure destruction. Yet, as geologists Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young explain in The Rising Sea, the general public is not aware of the seriousness and extent of these problems, and governments are ill prepared to deal with the challenges ahead. The aim of the book is to do something about this, and to provide the facts we need in order to cope with the consequences of sea level rise.

After first covering the causes of sea level rise and how we measure current sea levels, the book goes over how we project future rises and how significant these are likely to be. Here, Pilkey and Young sensibly acknowledge the difficulties in making predictions: for instance, carbon dioxide emissions over the coming years, which will help drive sea level rise, are unknown. But the trends we can find from looking at tide gauge data and satellite data are clear, the authors argue, and they conclude that we should work on the assumption that the mean tide level will have risen seven feet by the year 2100.

Later, the book moves on to what will happen as a result of this rise and what we need to do in response. It suggests, for instance, ways to better manage coastal wetlands so that marshes and mangroves, home to many species, are able to move in response to changes in water levels and salinity. And it argues we need to be more realistic about what we can do to prevent shoreline erosion and that we should accept that many communities at risk will need to be relocated. Mentioned in some detail is Carteret Atoll in the Pacific, a group of islands whose residents began to be evacuated in 1989; the authors rightly emphasise here that people are already having to leave their homelands as a result of sea level rise, and that this is not just a possible scenario for the future.

What struck me whilst reading the book was how often even concerned scientists seem to have underestimated the extent to which sea levels are likely to rise. For instance, as the book explains, in its 2007 fourth assessment report the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did not fully consider the contributions to sea level rise of the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. And some global change researchers have assumed that sea levels will rise at a steady rate over the coming years, even though it is probable that the rate is likely to increase. This is very worrying, and anyone who believes scientists tend to over-exaggerate the dangers we face from global warming should read this.

Throughout the book, Pilkey and Young make their points in clear language and draw on a large amount of research to support what they are saying; by the end, it is difficult not to be convinced of the book’s arguments. And because we hear first hand from some of the communities most at risk from rising sea levels – like, for example, the people of Shishmaref, a shoreline village just south of the Arctic circle, where the authors visited – the need to act now on behalf of these communities is made plain.

It’s difficult to find much wrong with the book, and it generally succeeds in what it intends to do. There is one small point, however. In a chapter entitled A Sea of Denial, we are told to ‘ignore declarations from non-scientists’ about sea level rise and climate change and to get our information from trustworthy sources like, among other places, the journals Science and Nature. I would have preferred it if the book encouraged us only to be sceptical of what we’re told from non-specialists, and there are some good journalists – like Mark Lynas in the UK, for instance – who know their stuff.

Overall, though, the book does a much needed job of speaking up about a very important issue. I hope policymakers begin to take the book’s advice sooner rather than later.

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Review by Matt Chorley

Heatstroke – Anthony D. Barnosky *****

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I thought I knew what this book would be about as soon as I saw that subtitle ‘nature in an age of global warming’. Save the polar bear, blah, blah… pity the poor furry creature. In fact it proved to be a wonderful surprise. What hits you first is Anthony Barnosky’s excellent writing style. It’s pitched at just the right level. It draws you in, keeps you interested and never gets stuffy. There’s enough of Barnosky’s voice in there to make it personal, and he really knows how put science across with enthusiasm and to great effect.

Then there’s the content. Barnosky carefully shows us how climate change has affected nature in the past – how some species adapt or move to cope while others will inevitably be wiped out. In that, the impact of global warming on nature is a perfectly normal occurrence. But, he argues, things are different now, in part because of the different pace of change, and in part because we have chopped up nature into small chunks and pushed species so close to their limits. The result is that there can be no unaided escape for many, many species. It should be obvious really. As climates have changed in the past, a species would move with its preferred climate. But if you’re cooped up in a national park in one part of the country and need to head north (say), what can you do when there’s a city and miles of concrete roads in the way?

Even if we don’t care about the at-risk species in isolation, Barnosky points out how much we benefit from having access to nature. There’s a risk here of using the Tefal ploy. This is the spurious argument for the space programme that says it’s worth spending all those billions on it because we get all the spinoffs. Like, er, non-stick frying pans. But there is a stronger argument for the benefits of nature, whether its in medicine or Barnosky’s example of the heat resistant bacteria, without which we would never have developed any of the DNA manipulation technology we use today, from DNA fingerprinting to medical applications of being able to slice and dice DNA. This still isn’t a great argument for saving the lesser spotted snark (or whatever), but it’s fair to say we don’t know what we need to save until we find the application.

One danger with such a book is that it’s all doom and gloom and there are no solutions. That isn’t the case here. While Barnosky’s suggestions for doing our own bits to save the planet (use low energy lightbulbs etc.) are fairly trivial he’s strong on suggestions for dealing with the impact of climate change on wildlife environments with a mantra of keep, connect, create that is persuasively argued. Whether it’s possible to find funding for this in a climate of recession is a different matter – but Barnosky certainly carries the day with his arguments.

My only concern about this book is the accuracy of one crucial piece of information. It repeatedly refers to the fact that recent global warming is much faster than any natural warming, saying that we could have a rise of up to 5 °C in as little as fifty years. This is compared with a similar rise between the last ice period and the current interglacial, which took hundreds of years to happen, allowing species to adapt. Contrast this with a comment by Australian climate change expert Will Steffen who said ‘Abrupt change seems to be the norm, not the exception.’ According to him, on 23 occasions during the last ice age, air temperatures went through massive climbs, pushing temperatures up by as much as 10 °C in around 40 years. Similarly Richard Alley, in a report for the US National Academy of Sciences, concluded ‘Recent scientific evidence shows that major and widespread climate changes have occurred with startling speed… this new thinking is little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and social scientists and policymakers.’ While this contradiction doesn’t undermine all the other great stuff in Heatstroke, it is a rather worrying contrast of information.

All in all, this is a superb book with a powerful message that we ignore at our peril. There is much more at stake than the poster-animal polar bear. It’s something we ought to hear more about. Highly recommended.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Ice, Mud and Blood – Chris Turney ****

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Anyone new to the climate change debate is bound to wonder whether a 5-6 degree increase in temperatures is really all that bad – especially if the person is cold, English, and nostalgic for summer. A good reply to this wonderment is to say that the last time the globe was 5 or 6 degrees colder, there were glaciers in the South of England, and the melting ice caused Britain to split off from France.

Chris Turney, a geologist at the University of Exeter, knows as well as anyone that climates past have lessons for climates present. In Ice, Mud and Blood, Turney’s humour and expertise make for a jaunty, fascinating account of how past climates worked and how scientists find out about them. But Turney spends little time linking past climate to present climate; so, as a contribution to the climate change debate, the book doesn’t live up to its promise.

As Turney points out, it’s a wonder that we know anything about past climate at all. Natural climate change occurs over vast periods, and events in the intervening millennia have played havoc with the evidence. Turney does a great job of showing how scientific detective work can, against the odds, give a clear and convincing picture of some key events in the last 3/4 billion years of earth weather.

To give one example: how could we possibly know that the tropics were covered in ice between 580 and 710 million years ago? As Turney explains, certain kinds of rocks tell us that glaciers once appeared in, among other places, Namibia; and the magnetism of the rocks assures us that those glaciers did indeed form at tropical latitudes. You might object – as some scientists did – that the earth had a bigger tilt back then, so that Namibia once swung around the freezing poles. A study of ‘evaporites’ – salt deposits from drying lakes that only occur in hot dry areas – puts paid to that objection, as do ocean deposits of iridium. As this example hints, paleo-climatologists can get technical at times. But their work is as impressive as cosmologists probing into deep space or particle physics getting into the guts of an atom.

The instruments used to detect past climates have their own fascination. The ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica – pipes of ancient ice, kilometres in length, drawn from some of the world’s most inhospitable climates – make for a good story, and Turney tells it well. Because these ‘archives’ of past climate are so hard to read, paleo-climatology is also tale of wrong turns, misinterpretations and dead-ends. Where there is just not enough data for scientists to draw solid conclusions – about the effect of climate change on cyclones in the Western Atlantic, for example – Turney is not afraid to say so. Where multiple sets of data converge on the same conclusion, he drives the point home.

Turney’s chirpy prose is helped along by sketches of the charismatic pioneers and hard-bitten explorers in the science of weather. Extra spice comes from Turney’s taste for history, love of hands-on research, and nose for a big idea. The big ideas include some intriguing conjectures about the interaction of climate and early humans. For example, Turney argues that the concentration of diabetes in Nothern Europe could be explained as an evolutionary response to the Younger Dyas, a cold period in the North Atlantic that ended around 10,000 BC.

Turney is rock-solid on the science of past climates, but cracks start to appear when he draws conclusions about current climate change. The problem starts with the book’s structure. It is arranged as a chronology of past climate, not as an argument for the state of current climate. Turney tries to link past to present in a final conclusion, where he asks ‘What does this all mean for the future?’ But it’s all a bit vague and last-minute. He simply draws some general lessons from the preceding 192 pages of history: greenhouse gases can power massive changes in climate; feedback effects can amplify small changes; and human action can rearrange our land, sea and atmosphere on a large scale. Compared to the quantitative detail of the other chapters, this conclusion is just hand-waving.

There is no doubt that, in the past, human activity, high temperatures, and high levels of methane and carbon dioxide, all caused big – sometimes cataclysmic – changes to weather and geography. But is our current situation quantatively similar to those past changes? Turney does not give a clear case. When he asks the numbers question, his answer is a short account of the famous ‘hockey-stick’ study, a comparison of temperature changes in the last century with those over the previous millennium. One wonders what happened to the previous seven chapters and the previous 700 million years they cover. Do the most recent climates give the best lessons, after all?

A determined reader might dig through the chapters to see if Turney makes the link between past climate to present climate on the run. Such a reader will find a number of hearty calls to action, but little hard-and-fast argument. For example, Turney emphasises the role of CO2 in the warming that occurred during the Eemian period around 120,000 years ago. But he also emphasises that increases in carbon dioxide lagged behind the warming. And the evidence he cites for CO2-driven warming considers just one ice core and takes up one paragraph. On some topics – such as the dynamics of melting ice – Turney makes a stronger case, but only with the help of models and evidence drawn from studies of present-day climate.

Ice, mud and Blood could have been more streamlined and persuasive. As a call to action on climate change, it is a missed opportunity. But as a story of scientific ingenuity and the wonders of nature, it takes every chance – and succeeds.

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Review by Michael Bycroft

Ecologic – Brian Clegg *****

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We’ve thought long and hard in the past about how to review books written by our editor, Brian Clegg. There’s always the danger of seeming biased. So for this book we’ve instead gone for a summary of what it’s about and a few quotes from an independent review in BBC Focus Magazine.

This is the thesis of the book:

We aren’t well equipped to deal with green issues. Our natural tendency with such an emotive issue is to be swayed by feelings, rather than logic. And that’s fine to get us all excited – but it doesn’t make for good solutions to green problems. Ecologic uncovers the reality behind the greenwash and the eco-bogeymen.

Here’s part of the review:

This book crackles. Every paragraph pits your heart against your head. Those with green sensibilities and a nervous disposition may have a cardiac arrest. But the rest of us will have our synapses set alight…

He rails at ‘MMR madness’ and has the notorious Channel 4 programme The Great Global Warming Swindle bang to rights as an intellectual swindle itself. He is intelligent on fair trade and the “muck and mysticism” of organic farming and understanding about our unfortunate confusion over biodegradables…

A cracking read for anyone who cares about both their environmental footprint and their sanity in a world being flooded with greenwash and gobbledegook. (5 stars out of 5)

 

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Review by Fred Pearce

It was an admirable task for Brian to set about analysing the true “green-ness” of those claiming to be green on several broad spectrum environmental issues. However, I found the book more debilitating and exhilarating when it came to changing my own behaviour to be green. The approach was methodical indeed, the arguments well founded and certainly I learnt more in depth about several issues including a real look at the “organic” movement. And yet, while the author’s best intentions are to reveal why and how we should be green, and properly green at that, there is little hint of this motivation apart from in the dedications and on the final pages of the book. Taking a scalpel to the “irrational” side of science is fine and yet it somehow cut out my raison d’etre of reading the book. By the end the book I was still wondering if cutting my carbon emissions would make the blindest bit of difference to anyone if nitrous oxide is the true bogeyman we should be focusing on, as Brian had factually pointed out.

On the positive and rather academic side the book made me ask lots of questions.

The best question the book made me ask myself was “what organic and natural things am I deceiving myself with that are actually really poisons?” It has stimulated much label reading in the kitchen and bathroom and a reverence for coffee, one the most toxic things I had not really thought much about until reading this book.

Oh well. If you want to pass your university Msc. in Science Studies by arguing and critiquing the issues then buy this book. If you want a green fairytale or a local green operational manual to inspire yourself out of eco-inertia you need to look elsewhere.

I am still waiting for a popular science book that is clear and easy enough to read in the bath to relax!

Community Review by Pema

Seven Years to Save the Planet – Bill McGuire ***

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There a lot of ‘how to combat global warming’ books out there, so to be worth reading, a book needs a new twist, and it’s fair to say that Bill McGuire has achieved this. Seven Years is divided into five parts – Where are we now? What will climate change mean for my children and their children? What can I do? What should others be doing? and Is it already too late? In each section there are a series of mini-chapters, each with a question, a little commentary and the answer, from ‘Will the Arctic Ocean soon be ice free?’ to ‘What is my carbon footprint?’

Of the main sections, the first two are far and above the best. McGuire is director of the Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, giving him ideal placement to be aware just what the threats are and their potential impact on our planet and our lives. He tells it straight, making it clear just how conservative the IPCC can be in its predictions, and how even relatively small changes can be enough to have a big impact for our children and our children’s children. This is scary stuff and deservedly so. We have a lot to do, and relatively little time to do it.

Where he is much weaker – and sadly, this is the bit we really need to hear – is on solutions. His ‘What can I do?’ section is full of the usual skim-the-surface changes we can make, adopting the standard knee-jerk solutions. About the only time he spots the dangers of over-simplification is when he mentions that Spanish tomatoes have less climate impact for UK buyers than the commercial home-grown greenhouse variety – but elsewhere his solutions are highly simplistic. On food, for instance, it’s organic, organic, organic – even though there are many circumstances where organic growing is worse for climate change (specific example, for instance, organic chickens, compared to conventional birds). Similarly, he emphasizes using the train for all long distance journeys, when coaches are greener, and a full car is also better than some diesel trains in the UK. He also pushes hybrid cars – fine for city dwellers like him, but there are much cleaner conventional small cars for country/motorway driving. Strangest of all he loves hydrogen cars, saying ‘Electric vehicles are becoming more attractive… but at the moment they are charged mainly with electricity generated by fossil fuels. Probably the best bet is renewably-generated hydrogen…’ But all hydrogen is, in effect, is an alternative to a battery. It’s used to store energy from electricity. And just like the electric cars, this electricity too would, for the moment, mainly come from fossil fuels. It doesn’t make sense.

In his urge to make us blame ourselves, he points out how we have stupidly not built lots more wind farms, the Severn barrage etc. – but nowhere does he point out that the biggest opposition to wind farms and the Severn barrage tends to come from green groups. He hasn’t bitten the bullet enough to tell people you’ve got to get over worrying about how pretty the country looks – this is about survival. He seems to think you can fix green issues but not deal with the politics. Oh, and he calls the G-Wiz cute. That’s really worrying.

All-in-all, then, half a great book, but in a book subtitled the questions… and answers, the answers don’t live up to the questions.

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Review by Brian Clegg