Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach (ISBN 0521567718)

Book Description:
Climate Change: a Multidisciplinary Approach provides an up-to-date, concise and comprehensive presentation of our current knowledge of climate change and its implications for society. This book is a valuable undergraduate textbook for a wide range of courses, including meteorology, oceanography, environmental science, earth science, geography, history, agriculture and social science. It will also appeal to a wider general audience of readers in search of a better understanding of climate change.

Well worth the (small) effort:
There are parts of this book that make tough going for those of us whose career in the hard sciences ended with AP Chem II in high school, but give yourself time, read it over, and you'll get a handle on it. This is a good book for people who want to understand the basic sciences of weather and climate.

The next step:
After reading some other text introducing the general topic of climate change, the next step should be this book. Burroughs does an excellent job of introducing the intermediate level to the concerned citizen. It is an unbiased account of the state of knowledge and covers a broad spectrum of climate change from statistical interpretation to continental drift. This is not a book for people that want to confirm alarmist or denialist positions, but a methodical (sometimes dry) walkthrough of the topic of climate change that require at least fundamental knowledge of natural science. Be prepared to do your homework though.

A useful introduction to a controversial and complex topic:
Many professional scientists need to rapidly access key information on specific aspects of a new domain of science they are vaguely familiar with. For me climate change falls in this category. I came across some very positive comments on this book and decided to make it my first introduction to the topic. I was particularly interested in measurements of climate change and broad descriptions of associated mathematics to guide me on planning the first steps on some work in that domain. I found chapters 4 and 5 particularly useful for that purpose. They provide appropriate qualitative descriptions of what I may need to look for in scientific papers to get me started on the development of some local empirical models. I found general discussions on the ENSO and other climatologic measurements of interactions between oceans and atmosphere pitched just at the right level. I will have no hesitation to recommend this text.