Book review: The Rough Guide to Climate Change
I picked up a copy of this a few weeks ago from Planet Books. It’s a guide to the science of climate change, part of the Rough Guide series which are known for their travel guides, but are now branching out into different topics. People who want to gain a solid understanding of the science and solutions will find the Rough Guide to Climate Change useful and easy to understand.
The sections are: the Basics, explaining the greenhouse effect; the Symptoms, describing what’s happening now and what might happen in the future; the Science, telling how we know what’s going on; and Debates and Solutions, which covers political, technological and personal ways to beat the problem.
Even though the series is called “rough” guides, the scientific detail is well-explained. They use the sort of reasonable questions a normal person would ask, such as: “how do we know the temperature is increasing?” and “what if there’s some other cause?”. It’s written in a conversational style that’s easy to follow and doesn’t assume you’re a professor.
The graphs used to help explain difficult concepts are clear and easy to understand. The photos aren’t of such good quality - they’re small and in black and white only. If you’re after large, glossy photos of environmental damage, I’d recommend the coffee-table book version of An Inconvenient Truth instead 
Also included are extra side-bars on related topics. I’m a Perth resident, so a short section on how changing weather patterns have caused lower rainfall here was very interesting to me. Another good one was about Micheal Crichton’s novel, State of Fear. There’s also a good section on climate-change deniers, describing what they believe and why.
Overall, this is a clear and easy to understand explanation of how our climate has gotten to it’s current state. I’d recommend it to anyone who would like to know the facts and figures of climate change, and will probably end up referring back to it often. The authors sent a copy to every British MP with a survey, and published the results - apparently they’re going to do the same thing in the US and in Australia, so I look forward to seeing what responses they get!