I bought With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists fear Tipping Points in Climate Change to investigate the concept of tipping points in climate change: how real are they, and what ones might exist. A lot of points are labelled 'tipping points', such as the melting of the Arctic; but, if we successfully reduced CO₂ to pre-industrial levels, would they revert, or would we have passed a point of no return?

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Fred Pearce is a former editor of New Scientist and long-timer writer on environmental science, and it shows in the clarity of his writing. With such experience he has a lot of material to work with, and it would be easy to roll out a collection of articles on the usual global warming topics as a book. But this is a better book than that. It is a review of climate change research, not just man-made, and the open questions our current research leads us to - such as Dansgaard-Oeschger events in the oceans, and, dust and drought in the tropics 5500 years ago.

Pearce writes well, explaining his subject matter clearly. Describing El Niño, for example , he describes in three sentences how the see-saw works: almost all other descriptions I've seen have started with the name, and described it backwards: its effects off South America, instead. It is much clearer to think of the build-up of water off Indonesia 'sloshing' back to America as winds slacken as westerly winds slacken.

In describing the developments of climate science in recent years, Pearce does a good job in highlighting research that is lesser covered, but has changed our picture of climate in the last decade: especially the acidification of oceans by carbon dioxide and the connection between aerosols and dust over Asia and the monsoons feeding it. It is important to see this progress, but the price of writing about the cutting edge is that the story is unfinished: we don't know the importance of the dust, yet. Hence, are the tipping points permanent ? the only one I would say yes to is glaciers: the glaciers of Greenland and the Himalayas, for example are over a mile high. At the top of a glacier is colder due to altitude than the base would be. So, if they disappeared, snow would fall and melt in summer on land where it would have stayed if had landed on a glacier. For the glacier to return, we would need ice ages to return.

So despite not really getting an answer to the my question, I enjoyed this book immensely, and would strongly recommend it.

An annoying feature however is the non-use of Metric. The book was published by Beacon Press in Boston so all the units are in Fahrenheit, etc. But its a very metric description: solar energy is described as "240 Watts per 10.8 square feet" : 10.8 Sq feet being 1 square metre. Everywhere yards are used to substitute for metres. But the volume measure of acre-feet is downright weird: do Americans really use such a strange measure?