It's a truism that we now live in a 'me' world, where many people have a toxic inward-looking attitude that is all about self-fulfilment and 'my truth' rather rather than worrying to much about facts, reality and making things happen. Climate books come in a wide range of types, some of which, like Bill McGuire's excellent The Fate of the World , explore the scientific reality and help us to work through its implications. But the environmental lobby has always had a branch that had no time for science and was, instead about how the environment makes us feel . And this book fits comfortably into that world. In itself, this isn't a problem if all you want to do is appreciate the joys of nature. But if, as this book's publicity suggests, you want to 'transform the deep ache and overwhelm many feel into a journey of purposeful action' we need both guidance on that action and a scientific basis to underpin that action.  Unfortunately, there is not an...

The science behind climate change has been well covered, including in Bill McGuire's own Hothouse Earth , but I've not before seen a book that doesn't just use model predictions, but looks back at what we know about the state of the climate in different periods of the past, and what caused it, to help get a feel for the reality of the impact likely occur from various levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. McGuire starts with an exploration of solar variation - something that climate change deniers frequently bring up as an alternative explanation for global warming - pointing out that it definitely has an effect, but that's irrelevant to the clear and massive impact of our greenhouse gas emissions. He then takes us through various aspects of past climate variation, from ice ages to huge sea level rises, with a clear warning on the ease with which the climate can undergo relatively sudden changes when a tipping point is reached. Along the way, McGuire is dismissiv...

In his subtitle, Tim Lenton makes a daring claim: this book is going to tell us how to fix the climate crisis. This is surely very timely when there has never been such scepticism about the need to take action that can damage economies. Lenton takes it for granted that things are bad, opening with statements like 'We are beginning to realize that we need to change course fast if we are to avoid catastrophe, and that we are not changing fast enough.' It's certainly true that some people realize this, but it's also fair to say that many don't, including notable major world leaders - there's always a danger of the academic 'we' being assumed to be representative of humanity as a whole. The solution that Lenton proposes (the title is a bit of a give-away) is that we 'find and trigger positive tipping points that accelerate change in our societies and technology towards sustainability and social justice.'  The book proper begins with an exploration of...

Apparently the biogeochemist (who even knew there was such a thing) Karsten Pedersen 'coined the term "intraterrestrials" to describe the abundant life within Earth's crust.' The idea of this book is boldly go and explore new life that is found below the surface and of which we have historically known very little. I must admit I winced a bit when the introduction yet again featured a diary entry from an author about to set off an expedition of discovery, in this case about to start a deep sea dive. This has become a cliché, which I hope we'll move on from soon. But that doesn't stop the actual content being fascinating. Inevitably we get plenty on extremophiles (living in everything from water well over boiling point to strong acids and alkalis) and the origins of life, something anyone reading this kind of popular science is likely to have come across, but there is plenty more, particularly around life dependent on volcanoes, that was new to me. Karen Llo...

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

In their book, Andrew Simms and Leo Murray tell us that ‘the enabler of [a] great shift in expectations and attitudes has been the advertising and marketing industries. Advertising is selling us an imagined lifestyle – the premise is that we can only we feel we are all living our best lives by flying around the world, driving ever bigger SUVS [sic], eating beef from cattle raised on cleared rainforest, and enjoying a vast array of consumer goods like there was no tomorrow.’ This book covers two of my interests, climate science and influencing the brain, so I thought it would be right up my street, but I found it depressingly bad. It's a polemic by enthusiasts that isn't really science driven. I don't like advertising, I think it can be manipulative - but the whole story was wildly overplayed here. I am certainly not aware, for example, of advertising making me eat beef from cattle raised on cleared rainforest, I have rarely seen advertising for beef per se, and only buy Bri...

This has probably been the hardest popular science book to review I've ever read, and because of this I'm going to give a relatively unusual structure to this write-up. The topic is fascinating. It's about the reality of making predictions - in general, and particularly about climate change. David Stainforth is very firmly of the opinion that climate change is an emergency that requires our action - but he is unusually honest it admitting that the problems of forecasting how climate change will proceed are so great because we face a whole pile of issues along the way. He highlights how predicting the way the climate will change is a 'one-shot bet' - we don't get to make a forecast time and time again, improving our technique. There will only be a single climate future. This isn't great because we are dealing with a very complex system, we are extrapolating into an unprecedented situation, and the chaotic, non-linear nature of the systems involved make predic...

There's a certain class of book that is beloved of academic authors, but that is often almost unreadable. It consists of a series of essays on a particular theme, each by someone different. Often they repeat each other, lack any cohesion and are deadly dull. I can only think that academics like doing them because it's a quick way to get a brownie point for having something published. This is such a book, but the good news is it's one of the most interesting ones I've read. The idea is to pull together two major world concerns: climate change and the state of democracy. Although there are a range of views, they all come from the same broad starting point that democracy is faring worse than it has for quite a while, that dealing effectively with climate change is best handled by democracy (despite some grudging acceptance that China is finally starting to get somewhere), and considering some of the impacts of climate change itself. The reason I'd say it's one of t...

Over the last few years a number of books, notably Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math , David Orrell's Economyths , Cathy O Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction and Tim Palmer's The Primacy of Doubt , have pointed out problems with the mathematical modelling done by businesses, physicists, meteorologists, epidemiologists, economists and more. These are not anti-science polemics, but rather people who know what they're talking about pointing out the dangers of getting too carried away with elegant mathematics and models, often assuming that the models effectively  are reality (and certainly presenting them that way in some of the writing and press releases from the scientists building and using the models). Erica Thompson takes on the problems of mentally inhabiting the mathematical world she describes as 'model land'. As she cogently points out, it's fine to play in model land all that you like - the problem comes with the way that you exit model land a...

The message of this book is interesting, and one I've rarely seen discussed - I would definitely have given it more than three stars if it wasn't for the extremely irritating writing style (more on that later). What Lewis Ziska does is to bring to the forefront an aspect of climate change that pretty much goes under the radar: its impact on plant growth. Mostly leaving aside the impacts of drought, wildfires and flash flooding, Ziska homes in on the implications that increased carbon dioxide levels have on plant biology. We all know that plants use the carbon dioxide in the air to get the carbon needed for growth - and that increased CO 2 levels can have an effect on that growth. But what's startling is both the lack of research into what the impact of higher carbon dioxide levels are - and the range of effects it is likely to generate (mostly negative). Perhaps the most frequent comment of the good scientist is 'It's more complicated than we thought,' - and th...