Climate Change

An interesting introduction to climate change: what it is, why is it happening, what are its effects and what could we do about it. Worth a read to get an overview of the science, politics and economics of climate change.

Chapter 1 looks at the history of climate change: the greenhouse effect, how we know how the climate was in the past and what are the current sources of greenhouse gases.

Chapter 2 looks at the debate around the science of climate change: the history of research into climate change, the mistakes made at the early stage of the science that lead to the conclusion that we were entering a cooling climate stage, the role of the media in reporting climate change and the growing sense that we were causing the current changes in climate.

Chapter 3 looks at the evidence for climate change: from temperature, precipitation and sea level readings and the challenges in making different ways in making the readings compatible. Methods used to measure have changed over the decades, so the data must be adjusted, otherwise the recording methods would bias the conclusions made from the data.

Chapter 4 looks at how the global climate is modelled and how the modelling has grown in sophistication and how scientists use the models to simulate the climate (past, present and future) to come to a confident conclusion that global warming is happening.

Chapter 5 looks at the impact climate change will have, from changes in weather patterns, sea level rise to the effect of more frequent and violent storms, floods and heatwaves. The effects on human health, food and biodiversity are outlined.

Chapter 6 looks at what possible surprises might be in store with global warming, depending on how the global climate reacts (slowly or suddenly) to global warming. Melting ice sheets, changes in ocean circulation patterns and the release of cold methane are some of the consequences.

Chapter 7 looks at the politics around climate change, with a history of the various attempts at coming to agreements about cutting out (or down) on carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon trading and REDD (Reduced Emissions and Deforestation and Forest Degradation) are also covered.

Chapter 8 looks at possible solutions to global warming, from adaptation and mitigation to alternative sources of clean energy. Geoengineering is also mentioned.

Chapter 9 looks to the future of the earth and which 'red lines' have been crossed or could be (like loss of biodiversity), what actions can still be taken and what solutions are possible.

This book gives a rock-solid scientific overview of climate change: its causes and effects, the scientific techniques used to characterize and model it, and policy alternatives and their political obstacles and ramifications. Maslin uses broad strokes to lay out the story, but isn't afraid to get into the necessary scientific detail when it's needed to make these ideas clear to the layman.

But I'm hesitant to recommend this book to any skeptics or interested laymen, for one simple reason: this book contains the worst academic copy editing (perhaps a complete lack thereof) that I have ever seen. Misspellings, run-ons and fragments, malapropisms, and dangling participles are rampant. Some sentences are so tortured that they seem to be saying the exact opposite of what Maslin's trying to express. Almost every page in the first half has grammatical errors -- the second half is a little better. This would be almost understandable in a first edition. It's unforgivable in a third, especially for a book that's so necessary, so needed, on such an important topic. Maslin has structured this book clearly and engagingly. It is a crying shame that Oxford University Press wastes his efforts by not providing the proper editing necessary to turn it into the valuable tool for understanding and persuasion it was meant to be. This could be fixed! The Fourth Edition could be made wonderful -- I encourage OUP to spend the effort to do so.