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...

Popular science topics are fairly evenly divided between those that are of pure intellectual interest, such as astronomy or relativity, and those with a direct impact on our lives - such as climate change or quantum physics. There's often a danger with the 'direct impact' that they can be a little worthy and try too hard to be deeply meaningful. For some reason this often seems to be the case with anything food related. But thankfully agriculture is a topic that is both rarely examined and has the potential for plenty of interesting science (and history thereof). Inevitably climate change does come into the mix, both in terms of its impact on our ability to grow crops and in the greenhouse gas emissions from cow burps, fertiliser and more. To make things more complex, with a growing world population and some parts of the world chronically short of food, we need ways to grow more without impacting the climate in a negative fashion. It's purely coincidental that I'm r...

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 ...

This is by no means a jolly read - with vivid stories, Liz Kalaugher takes us into the world of zoonotic diseases, both where humans are infected by largely wild animal diseases and where we spread disease among other species. The book voyages around the world and into the prehistoric past (entertainingly in a chapter that begins at Bristol bus station, the way all prehistory stories probably should), suggesting that perhaps the Neanderthals were wiped out by a lack of disease resistance. Kalaugher takes us on a genuinely engaging voyage of discovery, taking in a diverse range of fauna from honeycreepers and Tasmanian devils to ferrets, frogs and foxes. If, like me, you are distinctly averse to reading about anything medical, the thought of encountering avian pox, plague, West Nile virus and more can be a little unnerving, but on the whole the stories are more about the animals and their environment than too much medical detail. Probably the weakest part of the book, as is often the ca...

Sadly deceased in 2023, Karen Bakker combined geographical, environmental and technology interests, a crossover that she presented in her last book, Gaia’s Web . The idea here is to make use of the abilities of modern information technology, from machine learning to specialist sensors and satellite data to monitor both the state of the environment and those who are misusing it. As such there is some fascinating material here. Bakker  shows the power of digital eco-surveillance to protect the environment from everything from overfishing to forest fires, but emphasises rightly the accompanying danger that the same technologies can be used for surveillance by states. But Bakker sometimes undermines her own powerful arguments by taking a simplistic academic’s ‘capitalism bad’ approach that fails to recognise that without capitalism we wouldn’t have all this wonderful technology. There’s hypocrisy here.  This leads to the (highly confusing) sentence: ‘Researchers have raised concer...

Don Norman is, without doubt, one of the most influential figures in design - and particularly in making designs fit for human use. In his definitive The Design of Everyday Things he identified designs that 'probably won a prize' but that totally fail to make clear to the user how to use them. He pointed out that something as simple as a door, for example, had opportunities for design failure. Whether it was glass doors that couldn't be distinguished from windows, or doors you had to push that were fitted with a pull handle, he showed how a focus on appearance over usability could make for terrible design. In this book he attempts to take on an even bigger target - the way that we move the world away from its natural state, what can go wrong with that and how better design - and more inclusion of design in our approach - could change things. In principle, this is great, but unfortunately the book fails to deliver beyond broad brush concepts. Norman addresses how to communi...

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...

At risk of saying what everyone else is saying, this is a really important book, because it's covering something that hardly anyone seems to be thinking about, but that has a huge impact on our future. It's not really a climate change science book - for that you'd be better off with something like Bill McGuire's Hothouse Earth - it's more about the politics and economics of dealing with a huge impact of climate change will have - mass migration. Arguably this means it isn't really a science book at all (anyone who thinks economics is a real science either doesn't know what science is, or doesn't know what economics is). However, because the impending crisis is driven by a scientific issue, and has to respond to scientific forecasts, I think it's worth thinking of it within the popular science canon. What Gaia Vince does very powerfully is show how the changing climate is going to force humanity into large scale migration, with most likely well over ...