This is how it's organised:

Prologue: The Ice Age Now
Three chapters:
~ The Victorians' Ice Age
~ The Serbian's Ice Age
~ Deep Proof

Epilogue: Ice Ages and Us
Reference sources

There are documentaries about climate and climate change on the telly fairly frequently (most days if you watch the 'Discovery' programmes) and there are often items on the news programmes about changing weather patterns and the weather presenters regularly have some snippet to impart about how we're having more than the usual amount of rain or sun or high winds when you wouldn't normally expect them. Then there are all the weather and climate stories in the magazines and newspaper. So I sometimes get confused. There are so many indicators and some of them seem contradictory, like a bunch of ragged threads that you can't tie together properly. The planet seems to be warming up but some people say it isn't. Plenty of scientists say it certainly is and what's more, we, the humans are causing it. I'm so pleased that I bought this small, clearly written book. It's taken away the confusion and replaced it with a nice, tidy, coherent idea of how climate works. One thing I did understand before reading the book: climate and weather are very very complicated - so making it seem comprehensible to a non-technically-minded person like me, is no mean trick. Just 101 pages, written in plain English and I feel I have a much better understanding than I had only a few hours ago.

I recommend this book to anyone who would like a straight forward, not-too-technical account of how and why our climate changes.

The book is divided into 6 parts:

Prologue: The Ice Age Now
Three chapters:
~ The Victorians' Ice Age
~ The Serbian's Ice Age
~ Deep Proof
Epilogue: Ice Ages and Us
Sources

The information is quite densely packed, even though the authors found space for some of the scientists' personal histories - those that added something relevant and interesting. It gets off to an excellent start by telling us that we're living in an ice age and the world has rarely been as cold as it is today. We're given a brief history of the what scientists knew (or thought they knew) about ice ages in the past, starting in the early 19th century, and what they know now - and why they *know* they know it and don't just think they know it. The scientific methods used are very neat and no doubt, very much more complicated than you would guess by reading the book, but they're explained in such a way that I felt I'd had no difficulty understanding as much as I needed to grasp the basics of how it all worked.

I recommend this book to anyone who would like a nice, straight forward, not-too-technical account of how and why our climate changes.

Excellent primer in the recent breakthrough theories of the earths frozen history. Will be enjoyed by any non specialist who has a general interest in science.

But, to take a longterm view, there's been a cooling trend since the end of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Civilization, as we know it, began with global warming which started about 10,000 years ago. The emergence of modern humans began with a warm spell about 100,000 years ago. The big delay is due to an intervening Ice Age.

Though folks in Alberta, Alaska and Teec Nos Pos may not appreciate it for half of the year, we're now in the midst of a warm spell. If weather was normal, Minnesota might well be a "state of one massive ice sheet" instead of "the land of 10,000 lakes and 10 billion mosquitoes." Without global warming, the 'Day After Tomorrow' film would be real.

For better or worse, it doesn't address the current concern about human caused global warming. The emphasis is on how we came to know what we now know, a basic primer on weather plus some added background on past ice ages. The result is an excellent account of the procedures and values science as an intellectual process to discover how and why things work rather than providing a definitive and absolute answer to the unknown.