Recommended Books

Too Little, Too Late - the politics of climate change. By Colin Challen MP. Picnic Publishing, 2009. This is a remarkable exposé of the realities of climate change negotiations and other official processes - revealed as hopelessly inadequate to the task by the founder / chairman of the Parliamentary Group on Climate Change. Worth buying for the Prologue alone, a tragi-comic account of a morning in the life of a UNFCCC negotiator. Read this and you will know why official negotiations are going nowhere, slowly.
How to get your ideas adopted (and change the world) - by Anne Miller. Published by Marshall Cavendish. March 2009. An excellent guide on the factors discriminating against the acceptance of new ideas, and how to overcome. Highly relevant to Kyoto2 but also far more widely. Anne Miller is an authority on creativity, one of the world's most prolific female inventors and Director of The Creativity Partnership.
Climate Code Red : the case for emergency action, by David Spratt & Philip Sutton (Scribe Publications, 2008). "Climate policy is characterised by the habituation of low expectations and a culture of failure. There is an urgent need to understand global warming and the tipping points for dangerous impacts that we have already crossed as a sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. We are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points.
Hell & High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition - by Alastair McIntosh, (Birlinn, 2008). "In this groundbreaking new book, Alastair McIntosh summarises the science of what is happening to the planet - both globally and using Scotland as a local case study. But politics alone is not enough to tackle the scale and depth of the problem. At root is our addictive consumer mentality. Wants have replaced needs and consumption drives our very identity. In a fascinating journey through early texts that speak to climate change - including the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato's myth of Atlantis, and Shakespeare's Macbeth - McIntosh reveals the psychohistory of modern consumerism. He shows how we have fallen prey to a numbing culture of violence and the motivational manipulation of marketing. To start to resolve what has become of the human condition we must get more real in facing up to despair and death. Only then will we discover the spiritual meaning of these our troubled times. Only then can magic, new meaning, and all that gives life, bring hope to a broken world."
Climate Solutions by Peter Barnes is an excellent introduction to climate change policy. Admirably concise and well written, this book presents the often complex policy arguments in very clear and simple terms which can quickly be understood. He also reaches very sensible conclusions as regards US domestic policy, proposing a 'cap and dividend' system which promises both effectiveness and social justice. Published by Chelsea Green, Vermont, January 2008.
The Last Generation - how nature will take her revenge for climate change, by Fred Pearce. Eden Project Books, 2008. An excellent exposition of the dangers of runaway climate change by the award winning journalist Fred Pearce of New Scientist, The Guardian and elsewhere. If you are in any doubt as to whether climate change is really worth worrying about, read this book!
Six Degrees by Mark Lynas (2007, Fourth Estate). "Like many who watched the hurricane disaster strike New Orleans last year, I was shocked at the deprivations endured by the victims - left to fend for themselves in terrible conditions in the world's richest country. It was shocking in itself, but I also felt something else: that this was a window into the future, a glimpse of what may be in store for us all if nothing is done about global warming. I kept wondering: where next? How and what will happen as the world warms bit by bit? With up to six degrees of global warming on the cards over the next hundred years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), what will happen to our coasts, our towns, our forests, our rivers, our croplands and our mountains? ... Over the last two years I have sifted through thousands of scientific papers, published in dozens of academic journals, each with a prediction which is relevant to the century ahead. I categorised them all by degree, and on the basis of this unique compendium of data began to write chapters, each telling the story of how our world will change with each degree of global warming."
Heat - by George Monbiot (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2006). "We know that climate change is happening. We know that it could, if the worst predictions come true, destroy the conditions which make human life possible. Only one question is now worth asking: can it be stopped? In Heat, George Monbiot shows that it can. For the first time, he demonstrates that we can achieve the necessary cut - a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 - without bringing civilisation to an end. Combining his unique knowledge of campaigning and environmental science, he shows how we can transform our houses, our power and our transport systems. But he also shows that this can happen only with a massive programme of action which no government has yet been prepared to take."