As I read the first paragraph of climate scientist Chris Turney's new book Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past, I thought, "This is going to be an interesting book!" From the first paragraph, Turney captures your attention. He walks through the history of climate science in a succinct and interesting manner, which is not an easy feat for a writer or a scientist. Thankfully, he is both.

Ice, Mud and Blood has the readability of a novel with the feel of an interesting college lecturer. From the moment you begin to read it, it is hard to put the book down. Turney writes in almost a conversational manner, and is able to take complex scientific theories and explain them by using vivid imagery and ‘homey' analogies, as the following examples show:

"If it gets too cold, many species will die or (if able) pick up sticks and move. This is a bit of a headache when trying to work out what the temperature was doing in the past."

"Just as a blob of ice cream will flow away from the highest point, a slab of ice will also move if given enough time."

"Most corers are made up of a thin-walled aluminum tube, usually a meter or so long, and look like an anti-tank missile launcher."

Unfortunately, not every scientist is as talented a writer as Turney. In the introduction he points out that scientists have often done a poor job communicating their work, and states that they have "a lot of work to do." His comments highlight just how important he is as a scientific writer.

Although the book isn't about taking action against climate change, in the introduction and first chapter he calls the reader to action:

"We've been living on borrowed time, but we still have a choice. We can do something about the mess we've created. We can listen to the warnings from the past and change our ways."

"They'd lock you up and throw away the key if you wanted to pump billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere to see how it affected climate. Yet, seemingly without a care in the world, we're doing just that."

He addresses climate change skeptics towards the end of the book. According to Turney, the crucial question we need to ask is "whether today's temperature is above and beyond what we'd expect." To answer the question, he looks at "years when the climate went to an extreme," asking if that was unusual. Turney concludes this subsection by declaring that the "only way to explain" today's temperatures is the "increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

In several sections of the book, Turney mentions Greenland, including pointing out that "half of all freshwater in the world is locked up in Greenland." In a bit of irony, when I began to read the book in July, I had just read an article about Greenland in the July issue of Rolling Stone magazine. The author of the article pointed out that UNESCO put the glacier Jakobshavn Isbræ on its World Heritage List, but because of climate it loses 20 million tons of ice per day, equivalent to the amount of water used by New York City in a year. Sea level could rise three feet by 2100 if glaciers in Greenland continue to melt at that pace, flooding coastal cities.

Statistics like that remind me how important Ice, Mud and Blood is, and what a warning our planet's past can serve. As Turney points out, if the planet itself can cause dramatic climate change, just imagine what human induced climate change will do.