A climate change text book for our peers

• What additional amount of warming can we expect into the future?
• What proportion of warming in the past is due to mankind, and what to natural variability?
• Are the IPCC's models a good predictor of the future

His conclusions are that while there is a human contribution, its effect going forward is unquantifiable and unlikely to be catastrophic, and that there are many other things to be much more worried about.

His proof for this conclusion is logically laid out in chapters such as "The record of climate change", "The Greenhouse hypothesis", "Computer Modelling", "Climate and the Ocean", etc.

It is an arrangement that doesn't require sequential reading. If you hear something about "ocean acidification" you can easily find it in the table of contents, and less easily in the index, and the issue is generally explained along lines of claim and counterclaim.

Why "less easily in the index"? As there is no chance that the ocean will ever become acidic, and as technically the absorption of CO2 by the oceans will only make it less alkaline, ocean acidification is listed under "ocean alkalinity".

Clearly there is some more work to be done on communication, and scientific exactness really can get in the way sometimes.

Another area of weakness is the part of the book dealing with economics, perhaps best exemplified by the heading "Why are economists involved in a scientific matter anyway?"

Having started the book criticising government by experts, this is an unproductive digression. While scientists may have expertise in determining scientific facts they generally have none running economies. Someone has to propose what to do with the facts, and that role falls to economists, amongst others.

And a pricing mechanism, which Carter criticises, is the best way of changing human behaviour.

I would also have liked footnotes in the chapters. When one discusses climate change on the Internet there is always some obsessive with all the time in the day to trawl Google who challenges you to provide evidence in the form of a peer reviewed paper of some incontrovertible fact.

It's tiresome and time consuming, and some footnotes would have made it easier to reference those online conversations.

But the failures are few and the successes are many.

I'm looking forward to future editions, perhaps with access to a website where references can be curated and updated in real time. The science moves on. Since the book's publication the IPCC has released parts of its Fifth Assessment Report, where there is some retreat from previously held positions in the direction that Carter points.

It seems a pity to have to wait years for a new edition of this book in hardcopy revised to incorporate the latest and the best science. Perhaps if the authors sell enough books they may be prepared to invest in some more modern technology. At $30 an edition it's not cheap, but it's still a lot cheaper than investing in pie-in-the-sky climate regulation schemes.