Book Review

by Paul Ganderton

Houghton J. 1997. Global Warming - The Complete Briefing. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0 521 62932 2. pp xv + 251.

Considering the amount of material being produced on the global warming topic it is not surprising that some effort is made to summarise the issues involved for the less specialist audience. Houghton, co-chair of an IPCC group is ideally situated to do this. The 12 chapters taken to outline global warming fall roughly into four areas. An initial chapter introduces the topic and charts the way through the remaining text. The next two chapters deal with fundamentals: what is global warming and what contributes to it. This brings us to the third part which describes the modelling process, its limitations and potentials. Given such a grounding, the final chapter in this part examines the potential impacts that global warming can have. The final part starts with a radical departure from most texts on the subject. The author makes his ethical and religious convictions plain in an opening chapter which examines the moral dimensions of global warming. Here, it is argued that much of the problems we face may come not just from the physical aspects of global warming but our perceptions of them mediated through our belief-systems. The remaining three chapters return to the topic per se to consider the uncertainties in our knowledge and what we can best do to ameliorate the situation.

Overall, this text is a fact-filled and lucid overview of the subject. Each chapter has a very clear introduction, the usual boxes for advanced and supplementary material, a summary, questions and references. It covers not only the key ideas but also the uncertainties surrounding them making it far more of a reasoned treatise than polemic. This text could be used to good effect by senior students and teachers. This must be regarded as one of the best texts on global warming both for its clarity and depth of thought: a definite must for the library.