"What kind of world will our grandchildren inherit?” prods the large, yellow bullet point jumping out from the black background on the back cover of John Houghton's already classic textbook, Global Warming: The Complete Briefing . Students in an undergraduate or first year graduate seminar course—the clear target audience for this book—will come away with little doubt about the answer to this question: a warmer one. Essentially, this is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process distilled into a textbook. The first seven chapters, about two thirds of the book's 350 pages, provide a compelling account of the consensus IPCC view of the greenhouse effect, climate variability, climate modeling, climate projections, and the impacts of climate change. These chapters are without doubt the core strength of this excellent textbook, synthesizing an unprecedented two decades of community effort, scientific cooperation, and consensus building into a coherent view.
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Keith Alverson (2005) studied this question.