NonFiction - Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

This particular book by Tim Flannery is one of many books about Climate Change. However, unlike many other books in this area Tim does an excellent job of engaging the reader to think critically about this topic while at the same time allowing the reader to form his/her own conclusions. In other words this book is not one full of blame, anger, and who did what. Instead Tim (a paleontologist by trade) takes the hard science and explains it in a way that the average reader can understand. He spends about the 3/4 of the book discussing the impact of human activity (both good and bad) and explains what substantial changes have occurred over a very short period of time. He does an excellent job of illustrating how our frame of reference regarding time must be reevaluated in order to understand the full impact of climate change. Most of the impact to climate has occurred since the 1850s with many of the negative affects already beginning to take form now and continuing during the next 100 years or so. That is a time frame of about 250 years, which seems long to us but within the context of earth's age is extremely fast. In the latter half of the book Tim presents compelling solutions that can be done by individual people and government's world wide that are realistic and attainable without very much sacrifice.