Subtitled 'Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century', this book is a fairly academic read, though it is also clear and relatively succinct. In short, as the title says, beyond the smoke and mirrors around the debate, we are facing imminent disaster, simple as that.

Subtitled 'Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century', this book is a fairly academic read, though it is also clear and relatively succinct. In short, as the title says, beyond the smoke and mirrors around the debate, we are facing imminent disaster, simple as that. So the questions to answer are not about whether there is climate change, whether humans are mainly, partly or not responsible at all, and how quick climate change is coming – those answers are all in, and the short version is that climate change is already here, we are increasingly responsible for it and it's going, more or less, to take us out if we don't get to doing something serious about it immediately. The much more pertinent questions asked and answered in this book deal with the practical options are, how we ensure a sustainable future while still providing power and electricity for current needs against a backdrop of rapidly growing population numbers and which energy options make sense and which don't. Richter is a Nobel Prize winner, and so it's going to be difficult to simply dismiss his arguments, so climate denialist ought to give this one a miss. The rest of us may well wish to contend with some of his thinking around, for example, the pros and cons associated with nuclear energy (he's essentially pro-nuke, just for the record). On other topics, many of us will find ourselves in full agreement. Either way, this book is grist for the collective thinking mills which now need to be increasingly focused on getting us collectively through the 'eye' of the energy 'needle' and onto new terrain where the actual survival of our civilisation and even species isn't the main issue before us.

 Burton Richter    

Cambridge University Press

ISBN  978 0 521 74781 3