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.