I read this book carefully and engaged with its inadequate index, concluding that the classification of intelligent environmentalist advocacy could be applied to it. The clearly written and well illustrated arguments do not appeal, however, to someone who feels strongly that environmental policy-science-technology linkages deserve better. I remain a ‘climate agnostic’, and despair of the claim that the climate science debate is over. I also doubt that a rapid transition to so-called ‘clean energy’ globally is either possible or even desirable.

Students may well be stimulated by this wide ranging book (49 chapters on as many major themes) and have their views confirmed and green activism encouraged. The introduction by John Holdren (Obama's Director of Science and Technology Policy) would assure them that the science is ‘solid’, and that contemporary floods, droughts, heat waves and wild fires are manifestations of climate change. He recommends the book as the ‘goldilocks solution’ for graduate students and researchers wanting to bridge the gap between the difficult and long reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, where some ifs and buts are included), and its over-brief summaries for policy-makers. Indeed, the message of the book and the IPCC are identical, and former closely follows the structure of the reports only with less emphasis on climate and more on impacts and mitigation policies, though adaptation is mentioned. Predictions of doom are however followed by messages of salvation through policy interventions and engineered behavioural change. Fundamental debates between believers and doubters are ignored; critics are labelled ‘deniers’ and treated as political enemies. Like the IPCC, which supports a treaty of 1992 that assumes that man-made emissions will dangerously warm the planet, Schneider and co-authors use ‘their’ science to stifle debate. They make claims to their own ethical superiority that some may find deeply offensive.

The book is based on a policy model political scientists tend to reject as simplistic and unsuitable for international negotiations: that natural science (or is it computer model ‘predictions’?) are adequate to justify major global economic and technology policies changes, with decarbonization policies selected and implemented by ‘big’ government. The book's structure and argument support my earlier conclusion: that dangerous anthropogenic global warming, not just climatic change and variability, became an exploding topic not only for greening bureaucracies facing energy ‘challenges’, but also for a still expanding number of academic disciplines, organized research lobbies, not to mention hedge funds, promising or expecting a rapid transition to what is called sustainability. Did not a small group of environmental scientists, an epistemic community, and assorted national bureaucrats ‘capture’ the United Nations' treaty making bureaucracy via the UN Environment Programme, the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council of Scientific Unions?

Only one of the editors is a climate scientist, the recently deceased Schneider. He is supported in Chapter 2 by some of the ‘villains’ of the ‘ClimateGate’ affair that involved not only British researchers at the University of East Anglia, but led to much soul searching and continuing legal proceeding in the USA; nothing of all of this here. The remaining 47 chapters assume the gloomy predictions of the climate modellers and translate them into the ‘impacts’ arena, where it is often difficult to disentangle whether ‘evidence’ of harm, decline or catastrophe is derived from model predictions or real-world observation. I conclude by listing the five main weaknesses of the contents:

• • No engagement in genuine scientific debate.

• • Uncritical approach to the IPCC and its major sponsors, the United Nations and the European Union.

• • Strong USA bias, with c. 75% of the contributors coming from a small number of North American institutions.

• • Lack of political analysis; advocacy is centred on magical ‘policy makers’ whose powers and limitations are not analysed but who are expected to deliver much.

• • A lamentably weak analysis of the economic impacts of the recommended rapid decarbonization of the energy supplies. When dealing with corporate responses, only those of the beneficiaries of decarbonization are considered.

I noticed that Greece, in 2000, is described as the country most worried about climate change (p. 177); and that the book ends with a chapter on the renaissance of nuclear power.