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IN THE debate over global warming, many have claimed to have found a middle ground and charted a third way between the extremes of denialism on the one hand and utter despair on the other.

Consider a few recent examples. For the Danish environmental apostate , the middle ground means coping with moderate climate change while striving to help the world’s poor – but Lomborg ignores or downplays worst-case climate scenarios, which hopelessly undermines his argument. Meanwhile, US environmental renegades have claimed that a third way can be charted if we de-emphasise mandatory emissions caps, and instead stress immediate and heavy investment in new energy technologies – but of course we really need both approaches to escape from the current mess.

So you can imagine my scepticism at the claim by science writer and 91av consultant and the UK government’s former science adviser that their book, , will at last navigate us carefully between the extreme views on global warming and offer a compromise. Haven’t we heard this promise before?

By the end, though, Walker and King have not only lived up to their promise, but vastly exceeded it. Their overview of the science and policy of climate change is a model of clarity, comprehensiveness and, above all, sanity. It truly does find a middle ground in the climate debate – and in the process, probably counts as the single most important book on the subject to read between now and December 2009, when the world will, we must hope, negotiate the successor to the .

It is ironic that, at least in the US, King has been depicted as some kind of climate radical. Sceptics have pounced on King’s undeniably impolitic claim that global warming poses a greater risk to the world than international terrorism and used it to frame him as an unhinged extremist.

The Hot Topic demonstrates otherwise. Walker and King mount a reasoned defence of several environmental heresies, such as the need to rely upon nuclear power in the future and the idea that some people and some parts of the world will surely benefit from having a different climate. They also don’t shrink from discussing the importance of efforts to adapt to climate change – another potential heresy, in that many environmentalists believe that highlighting adaptation distracts from efforts to ratchet down emissions. In the hands of Walker and King, though, adaptation becomes an essential part of the climate policy story.

With exemplary even-handedness, Walker and King debunk scientific misinformation from both sides with grace and concision. If the book has a weakness, it is in dismissing the notion of geoengineering as too radical. Geoengineering – purposely modifying the atmosphere to help mitigate the damage we have done – is an option as a possible part of the solution. It’s a tool in the toolbox, and can’t be treated as taboo any longer. We’re past that luxury.

Ultimately, The Hot Topic reads as a primer for the next two years of climate-related political battles, which will culminate, it now seems certain, at the . The book examines the specific political situations of the top dozen or so polluting nations and discusses how to get them all to cooperate. In this, it is just as useful to a policy-maker as to an average citizen.

“It reads as a primer for coming climate-related battles”

I would advise anyone to read The Hot Topic not only before seeing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which is sometimes less balanced in its treatment of the science and policy, but also before reading a book like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe, which is more lyrical, perhaps, but less comprehensive.

Walker and King’s book represents the best available proxy for ploughing through the definitive source of climate information on the planet: the dry and wonkish reports of the . And that really is saying something.

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