This collection, co-published by the University of Southampton ‘independent initiative’ (founded by the two editors), combines dire warnings about the probable consequences of climate change with constructive advice about how to avert, even survive it. All the contributors work for British institutions and, excepting the long general position paper by South African-born Aubrey Meyer and two assessments of the Bush Administration's poor response to the 2003 ‘Pentagon Report’ (on the implications of climate change for USA national security), the book is unabashedly written with current British policy, media reports and audiences in mind.

I will ‘cut to the chase’ about the most important thesis proffered by the volume as a whole. The possibility of billions of tonnes of methane being expelled into the atmosphere by the unfreezing of the world's largest peat bog (in Siberia), of the Gulf Stream collapsing, and of humanity not being able to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently and in time, presages so ‘bleak’ a future scenario for our planet that it ‘would be little short of apocalyptic’ (Levene & Cromwell's Introduction, pp. 1, 6). Because of unprecedented food shortages, political tensions between rich and poor nations, and between neighbouring states, will abound, one chapter in the book (by Steve Wright) being exclusively devoted to ‘preparing for mass refugee flows’.

To compound the enormous problem, social sectors working to solve it are not coordinated, government policy-makers, business, the universities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the media all doing what they believe is helpful, but without conforming to any well defined strategic (or ‘umbrella’) planning, and often ‘missing the point’ (p. 137). This is clearly the case with the British situation, as the editors convincingly show in their introductory statement, and as contributors reinforce through usefully more focused chapters (James Humphreys on politicians; Melanie Jarman and David Ballard on corporations; Jonathan Ward on academics; John Theobald and Marianne McKiggan on mass media; and George Marshall on NGOs). When it comes to intellectual life, it is patent that tertiary educational bodies have not prepared either their teachers or those they send out into the working world for interdisciplinary study, or for any readiness to switch from routine specialization to the pooling of resources in solution-making forums. In more general social terms, the make-up of democratic (would-be non-totalitarian) societies like Britain is such that key collective actors in the current situation of anxiety are free to respond to it on their own ways, and (more worryingly) on their own terms (with politicians forever affected by vote-catching, business with profits, media with cajoling our senses, and so on). The editors are dead right in their urge to reverse the pattern of centrifugal responses to a centripetal one.

The major paper by Meyer, co-founder of the Global Commons Institute in London, naturally backs his organization's ‘contraction and convergence’ (C&C) approach, which he sees as having been taken up by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The C&C model is basically that of contracting human-made greenhouse gas omissions by international negotiation, but with a ‘global treaty’ that achieves fairness and ‘equal rights’ in ‘the global carbon budget’, named ‘the process of convergence’ (p. 32). Calculations for equitability in this case are not easy, since it is still being worked out as to precisely how much of the looming crisis is human-caused, but the typically striking differences between rich and poor country emissions calls for ‘a war on the error’ (of misguided industrial standards), more than any ‘war on terror’ (p. 48, cf. pp. 36–47).

Meyer's insistence on points of justice reveals that the solution to Climate Change is not just about the science and the ‘mechanics’ of correcting biospheric balance qua natura solitaria; it is also about relationships and ethical issues between human beings in varied environmental contexts. The book is important for appealing to worthy values. The problems can only be tackled by appeals for us to behave truly nobly under the circumstances, with sacrifices bringing ‘healing, tolerance and basic loving kindness,’ to state them most positively (the editors, p. 21), or to ‘avoid murdering’ Mother Earth (ibid., the editors referring to the macrohistorian Toynbee Reference Toynbee1976), to sum them up as a jolting negation. Or else, the least we might expect from would-be survivors might be self-interest, hopefully most of it ‘enlightened’, as Jim Scott opines in a chapter on this relevant matter of principle. The fact that one of the editors (Levene) is a Reader in Comparative History has obviously helped to create an important interface in this book, protagonists for good science and well-considered social ethics being called into an ongoing, demanding demanding conversation.

Appendix 1 contains a valuable layperson's glossary of terms used in the global politics of climate change, and Appendix 2 a list of relevant (unfortunately almost exclusively British-based) organizations like the Crisis Forum.