healthier, happier and richer

This is an irreverent but rigorous, fact-filled reference guide to low-cost, low-carbon living for everyone in tough times.

Anyone who cares about the survival of human civilisation should read this book. It is packed with facts and statistics about solutions, and shows that we must stop arguing about which is cheapest or best, because we need all of them.

Six Degrees won the UK Royal Society Science Books Prize in 2008. It’s extremely well written and readable, but, because it is an illustration of the effects that different temperature increases will have, it is not exactly cheerful. Yet, anyone interested in climate change – or indeed human survival – should read it.

While world leaders are in Copenhagen grappling with global greenhouse gas emissions, most of us have more prosaic issues to sort out this week – what to get friends and family for Christmas, how to do something for charity and, perhaps stirred by Copenhagen, how to do something to help reduce global emissions.