An overview for policy-makers and members of the public with a school-level understanding of science. It is fully referenced and so is of use as an introductory text to human-induced global warming issues for first and second year university students seeking understanding beyond their discipline
Part 1: The global commons and economics.
1. The global problem
2. Environmental policy, economics and the global commons.
Part 2: Climatic and human change
3. History of the global climate
4. Climate change and global warming
5. Greenhouse fundamentals
6. Busines-as-Usual
7. Alternatives
8. Efficiency – plugging leaks
9. Reforestation – The garden versus the greenhouse
10. Energy policy
Part 3: Economics and greenhouse perceptions
11. Freeing the green market
12. Perceptions and responses
13. Future climatic and human change
"The value of this text lies in the multi-disciplinary approach. Few texts approach it and even fewer acknowledge the power of perception over reality. For this reason alone it is a useful addition to the literature."
Teaching Ecology News (British Ecological Society)
"The author of this new book on climate change and response has a strong commitment to both the public understanding of science and its appreciation. He seeks to explain in the simplest possible terms the many complex strand in the argument and evidence for climate change, emphasising the numerous specialist perspectives contributing to the evidence...
On one hand, it would be easy to criticise this book as containing too many arguments that are perhaps peripheral to the main concern. In contrast, its strength could equally be claimed to be in the demonstration that the argument itself depends on a wide range of disparate evidences, each providing new facets of the complexity of the ecological systems on which our fragile economic and social systems depend. Written perhaps particularly for policy makers who have no formal training in science, students, teachers as well as the general public, will find its breadth and very readable style both illuminating and refreshing. Certainly they will be introduced to questions which they may not have previously considered as being connected with the wider issues of climate change and the necessary response of the human species to that change.
International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology
"This book demonstrates the sheer complexity of many environmental issues both scientifically and politically. It will provide invaluable material for a host of tutorials and essays, and I hope, discussions in pubs, clubs and Parliament."
Journal of Biological Education
"The strengths of the book are its great breadth coupled with its depth of treatment in may areas, together with its light, readable, affable style. It is unique in covering topics that range from climatology and ecology right through to sociology and economics and in doing so with confidence and authority. It is also good to find that it does not, like so many texts, provide a simple set of answers to all questions, but presents the arguments on the basis of current opinion is established. If there is one area of science where tablets of stone are entirely inapplicable it is this one."
Dr P D Moore, Chairman of Human Environmental Sciences, King's College, London.