It will be said of this book that it should be pressed into the hands of all those who deny the reality of climate change, or who think human activity is not contributing to it. But of course it won’t be and, even if it were, they wouldn’t open it. Those on Planet Exxon are beyond the pull of reason.

The fate of Gabrielle Walker and David King will be to preach to the converted. It does no harm to have an endorsement from Al Gore (who found the book “a beacon of clarity”), but how much more satisfying it would have been to see Dick Cheney on the cover. Cheney and King, who until recently was chief scientific adviser to the UK government, are mutual bêtes noirs.

Cheney, the former vice-president of Halliburton, typifies for King the commercial degradation of American politics, exalting economic short-termism über alles and inviting the future to go hang itself. For the string-pullers in the Bush administration, King is a wantonly destructive mullah in a scientific axis of evil. In 2004, when he concluded that climate change was a worse threat than terrorism, the White House let the dogs out. Bush’s climate-change adviser Myron Ebell (who, not-so-coincidentally, was director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Exxon-funded “think-tank”) denounced King as “an alarmist with ridiculous views who knows nothing about climate change”. Given airtime by Radio 4’s Today programme, Ebell argued that global warming was “a tissue of improbabilities” cooked up by European climatologists in the pay of governments whose only interest was to “attack America's economic superiority”. Even No 10, self-proclaimed world leader on climate change, took fright and tried to put a sock in King’s mouth (amusingly, he was advised to steer clear of Today).

With Australia, America’s last partner in obduracy, now having signed up to the Kyoto Protocol (an event that occurred too late for the authors to celebrate here), the world has decided whose views it finds ridiculous. Insofar as the science is concerned, the battle is won and the opposition reduced, as Walker and King put it, to “vested interests or fools”, who won’t be queuing to read this exposure of their stupidity. Even America itself has had to acknowledge the probable existence of man-made climate change. But this does not mean the future can sleep easy in its bed. “Social, economic and cultural barriers,” the authors say, “all stand between the world we have now and the one we will soon have as climate takes its toll.”

With the clarity that Gore rightly commends, they do a fine job of setting out the issues. If you’ve got a climate sceptic to deal with, you’ll find all the ammunition you need to puncture his certainties. Even-handedly, they do the same with the end-is-nigh overstatements of the extremely-greens — no, the Gulf Stream is not about to shut down, and it will take time before London, New York and Tokyo are consumed by floods. Much of the content will be familiar to any literate person with an interest in the world. But as well as revisiting the basics (why and how warming is happening, why we need carbon reduction targets, what faces us if we fail to meet them), Hot Topic precisely locates the political impasse and delineates the issues that have to be resolved between the developed countries (which caused the problem and possess the technological resources to defend themselves) and the developing ones (who are innocent victims but will bear the worst and earliest consequences).

Where does fairness lie? Should the heaviest polluters with the most luxurious lifestyles gradually cut their emissions, and the lightest polluters with the most deprived lifestyles be allowed to increase theirs until they meet at some mutually agreeable point in the middle? Should targets be set for individual market sectors or industries? Should emissions targets be calculated per unit of economic growth (a proposal unlikely to have much effect environmentally, but likely to favoured by the Americans)? How can multinational polluters such as air transport and shipping be accounted for?

Remarkably, while acknowledging that “no single approach will be acceptable to everybody”, Walker and King manage to keep their spirits up. They identify some unlikely heroes — Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, who has committed his Californian bailiwick to an 80% emissions reduction by 2050 and, to set an example, “has taken to driving a hybrid Hummer”; and the citizens of the oilman’s capital, Austin, Texas, who aim to be carbon-neutral by 2020. They encourage us to be part of the solution. We mustn’t be nimbyish about wind-farms; must be open-minded about nuclear power; must measure and reduce our carbon footprints. We must keep ourselves informed, and make sure our community leaders do the same.

To be fully connected citizens of the modern world, we need to understand the price our children and grandchildren will pay if we refuse to acknowledge their right to a livable planet. The catastrophes of Katrina and Darfur might not have been due directly to global warming but, in their hideous combinations of natural disaster and human conflict, they stand as stark templates for an unreformed world. No family bookshelf is complete without an account of the most burning issue of the age. “I don’t believe,” said King, at the time of his attempted muzzling in 2004, “that we can keep the public on side if it is not understood . . . that our scientists are prepared to give out and say what they mean.” That he stood his ground, and has said what he means with such lucidity, is a material gain for the axis of good.

Warm-up men

Walker and King take aim in their book at several of the more common myths about climate change. They dismiss arguments that it was warmer in the Middle Ages than today (“temperatures are higher now than they have been for at least 1,000 years”, they insist) and disagree with the idea that warming is due to changes in the sun (in fact, “left to itself, the sun would have caused a slight cooling”). The disappearance of snow from Mount Kilimanjaro, they point out, tells us little about global warming (the retreat actually started in the early 19th century, and is not yet fully understood), and Antarctica is not about to slide into the sea — the old, cold eastern half is unlikely to melt, and much of the more vulnerable West Antarctic ice sheet can be saved, they say, if we act quickly.

THE HOT TOPIC: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On by Gabrielle Walker and David King
Bloomsbury £9.99 pp309

Available at the Books First price of £9.49 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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