The Weather Makers: Our Changing Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (repost)

Terrifying and inspiring, "The Weather Makers" is a page-turning epic that brings the most elusive and powerful of natural phenomena within our grasp. Internationally acclaimed writer, scientist and explorer, Tim Flannery takes us on a journey through history and around the globe as he describes the wondrous diversity of the world's ecosystems, and explains how the great aerial ocean' unites us.

Along the way, we meet polar bears and golden toads, and travel from ocean depths to mountaintops, via desert, swamp and rainforest. Flannery reveals how the earth's climate has changed, across millennia and decades, and how the slightest imbalance has had far-reaching, unexpected consequences. The weather - everything from hurricanes to heatwaves - cannot be understood in isolation. With panoramic scope and limitless enthusiasm, Flannery shows how we have come to appreciate this history and contrasts our early primitive attempts at forecasting with our current knowledge of the forces that are shaping the future. And he combines a huge breadth of sources and new evidence to write with complete authority about what that future holds: as we continue to heat the planet, humanity and the entire natural world, face unprecedented dangers and challenges. Flannery makes them real - and he argues forcefully for the solutions that we all should be seeking now. "The Weather Makers" transports us as we share Flannery's wonder at the sheer magnificence and diversity of nature, and grips and inspires us as he conjures up a vision of our past, present and future.