I would have preferred the title to have been ‘Climate Change’, but the subject of this book is of continuing interest and concern to all. Those who doubted the long-term changes and those who doubted man's implication in the phenomena of climate change are being shown by the accumulating evidence that their doubts were unjustified. This book presents interesting examples from across the range of evidence to show that progressive changes are occurring, that there is considerable variation in our weather both spatially and temporally (uncertainty), the causes leading directly and indirectly to climate change, and many examples of the less direct consequences of the changes.

The author avoids esoteric accounts of the causes of climate change and of the simulations used to estimate future conditions and instead provides explanations and descriptions which are appropriate to the intelligent reader educated in other subjects. The visual aids – graphics, figures, and photographs – are mostly well chosen to aid understanding. While certain accounts, e.g. those of carbon trading and the Kyoto and Montréal Protocols, are little more than apologies for the Western political and commercial systems, and while underlying problems such as population growth, the consumption of resources and food production are given only passing recognition, the book, as a whole, presents a most instructive account of the current and future problems and their causes and does discuss ways to delay their onset.