The book does not pretend to grapple with climate change with the sort of minute detail and analysis displayed by three books on the subject that came out earlier this spring (The Winds of Change, The Weather Makers and Field Notes From a Catastrophe), and yet as a user-friendly introduction to global warming and a succinct summary of many of the central arguments laid out in those other volumes, the book is lucid, harrowing and bluntly effective.

Like Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance, this volume displays an earnest, teacherly tone, but it’s largely free of the New Age psychobabble and A-student grandiosity that ran through that earlier book. His inordinate fascination with policy minutiae has been tamed in these pages.

The charts in Earth in the Balance tended to make the reader’s eyes glaze over, the ones here clearly illustrate the human-caused rise in carbon dioxide levels in recent years, the rise in Northern Hemisphere temperatures and the correlation between the two. Gore points out that 20 of the 21 hottest years measured “have occurred within the last 25 years”, adding that the hottest year yet was 2005, “a year in which more than 200 cities and towns” in the US set heat records.

As for the volume’s copious photos, they too serve to underscore important points.