Climate change has (finally) become a global issue which demands the attention of every human living on this planet of ours. In order to take or support the required corrective actions, we need to familiarise ourselves with the concepts and the implications. It is our responsibility to educate ourselves.
These days there are so many books out there on the topic of climate change. I’m sure all of them are packed with useful information and are worth reading. This one was given to me as a birthday present and I’m glad the choice was made for me because it was a great read. It’s a small book, which can easily be digested in two or three reading sessions. But despite it’s diminutive volume, it manages to summarise the important information one needs in order to gain an understanding of what climate change is, what causes it and what the different solutions are as well as the positive and negative arguments for each one.
I’ve known what climate change is for a long time, but I didn’t know what the actual implications are of a global increase in average temperature. This book explains what the impact could be under different scenarios. The author then goes on to look at different alternatives for mitigating climate change and adapting to climate change. This includes a good summary of the Clean Development Mechanism, carbon credit trading and the Kyoto Protocol, as well as others. These are all terms that I have heard before but only after reading this book do I know what they are and how they work. The book looks at the effectiveness of these tools and reveals their shortcomings.
There is also a chapter on the role of the World Bank in climate change and how it’s policies are in fact contradictory. This phenomenon of contradictory policies has become less uncommon of late. George Monbiot has an interesting post on the contradictory policies of the British government.
By the end of the book, the reader realises that there is a lot more that needs to be done if we are going to avert the disasters that climate change will bring with it. I highly recommend this book to those who want to gain an understanding of climate change and the related issues.
Obtain Climate Change by Melanie Jarman from Kalahari.net