No credit where it's due

The planet owes Nicholas Stern a big thank you. His Stern Review on climate change, written for Gordon Brown in 2006, had nothing new to say about the science of global warming, but he rewrote the story in the language of economics. Setting aside crashing ice sheets, spreading deserts and super-hurricanes, he warned instead of an economic crisis 10 times worse than the one we are experiencing now.

Presidents and prime ministers react to scientific and environmental alarums with incomprehension and a call to a junior minister. But they know that keeping the economy afloat is their job. So by changing the language, the now-ennobled Lord Stern made climate change the business of the G20 and the UN security council, not environment ministers and UN satraps.

He had another effect, liberating climate change from the suffocating embrace of science. It needs more languages: not just economic, but poetic and legal, ethical and financial. Scientists hate this, but it is essential if we are to democratise and defuse the climatic disaster awaiting us.

These three books cover the economic, political and corporate profiles of the single biggest threat to human society in the 21st century. Each author acknowledges the tragedy that it has taken so long for their worlds to take climate change seriously. A quarter century has been wasted. But at least now they are on the case.

Guardian