This well-written and approachable textbook would also provide a useful book for the interested layperson. It covers the widest range across the subject in a clear and informative way for both science students and non-scientists. Particularly welcome are the sections on policy and political debate and how they link to the science.

The first seven chapters cover the science of climate change in all its various aspects. The last six chapters move through models and emission scenarios, and through impacts, social change and aspects of growth, mitigation and adaptation on to emission reduction policies of carbon credits/cap and trade systems. The final chapter gives a short history of the political debate, and the climate science behind it, and pull together the strands into one particular strategy. Greater consideration of China's role here would have been instructive and useful, as would that of agriculture.

The role and credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is accepted rather unquestioningly and counter debates and data and the role of scientific partiality are dismissed too lightly in places. More recent work highlighting the increasingly poor fit of models to observed current effects and divergence of global CO₂ levels and temperature are not covered. Nitrous oxides (not even in the index) in both greenhouse effect and mitigation as significant greenhouse gas contributors are worthy of greater coverage. These reservations aside, the book deserves a wide readership.