Product Description

The hole in the ozone layer is now the size of a continent. Ships can negotiate the North West Passage without confronting pack ice. Floods devastate Mozambique and tinder-dry forests of the American North-West go up in a blaze. Yet scientists are still divided as to whether this is a random blip or an irreversible trend. Worse, political and corporate jargon confuses the issues, sometimes with deliberate disinformation. This book charts up-to-the-minute developments, explores the extent that the human race is responsible for the catastrophes and suggests what can be done to prevent them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #699551 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-27
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

From the Back Cover
Heatwaves, hurricanes, droughts, floods - recent years have seen in increase in 'record-breaking' instances of extreme weather. Caught up in this whirlwind of extremes it's no wonder that speculation about more deep-rooted climatic change is a constant of today's news.

There's a palpable anxiety that it can no longer be explained away as natural variation and human fingerprints are being detected all over the crisis. With billion-dollar natural catastrophes occurring with alarming regularity, the insurance giants are getting jittery.

The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change sifts scientific theory from scientific fact and presents the impacts on health, farming and wildlife, along with an analysis of political negotiations on the issue and potential solutions to it.

'Climate Change is a pressing problem. Books like The No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change are invaluable tools to spread critical information ... Dinyar Godrej writes in an engaging style, avoiding the jargon.' Athena Ronquillo-Ballesteros, Campaigns Co-ordinator, Greenpeace Southeast Asia

Customer Reviews

Save the planet on your way to work.
The No Nonsense Guide to Climate Change is a quick and easy way to get up to speed on some of the science and formative international agreements covering possibly the most important issue facing humanity. The guide is laid out clearly and is littered with useful diagrams and easy to understand sets of facts and figures. One of these is a world map showing extreme weather conditions in 2000, which are frighteningly many and cover all of the continents - additionally it looks at the economic and human costs of these freak weather events and makes a very valid point that although extreme weather effects us all, it is more disastrous for those living in poverty than the developed nations such as the US - one example is the effect of hurricanes on the rich and poor worlds: The rich lose $22 billion, with $16 billion covered by insurance with a death toll of 52, whilst conversely the poor lose $7 billion of which only $150 million is covered by insurance and the death toll is over 11,000!

In short, this book will give you an overview of what has happened so far and some predictions for the future whilst keeping in mind that there are positive effects we can all have both as individuals and as nation states. The No-Nonsense series does what it says on the tin and won't baffle you with science or too much rhetoric.

Well worth reading, but additional research would be needed to get a more detailed knowledge of the contemporary debates as the book is becoming dated mainly due to the Earth Summit 2002 and recent updates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The whole story of climate change
Climate change has, unfortunately, become an issue clouded by politics. Here, then, is a calm, measured voice, informed and informative, to stand against the loud lone voices trying to talk down this most pressing issue. The science is elucidated and unravelled from the politics, with evidence that nature and the weather is already telling us climate change is here and happening clearly presented. The book ends, as it must, with the chapter, "Lasting solutions to a global crisis". Small, short, sensible and useful.