杏吧原创

Climate: Into the 21st century edited by William Burroughs, Cambridge University Press, 拢24.95, ISBN 0521792029 Reviewed by Fred Pearce

JUST feel the heat. Tens of thousands died across Europe this summer in the warmest temperatures on record. Last autumn, central Europe had record floods. Weird weather is nothing new, of course. The 20th century opened with a hurricane that devastated Galveston in Texas, killing about 10,000, and with millions dying in an Ethiopian drought. But equally, there has been a lot of it about lately. A record number of records have been broken in recent years. We are all familiar with the lexicon of melting ice caps and desertification, El Ni帽o and his kid sister, the North Atlantic Oscillation.

There are remarkably few books that provide a bridge between the weather we experience and the scary predictions for future climates. Climate fills the gap. It explains, in coffee-table-book-sized chunks, the world鈥檚 climate system and provides an excellent analysis of the growing climatic variability of the 20th century, before heading into the future.

There is probably no more complete, single popular volume on where we are with our weather. Edited by Bill Burroughs, a meteorologist noted for his caution about the crasser views of our climatic future, its grim predictions carry greater weight.