PREFACE

I had a most satisfying career, able to do what I really wanted, paid to teach and do scientific research and free to explore where my curiosity led me. That is the working life of many a scientist, and I was certainly one of the lucky ones. Now, I had never taken much notice of climate or the weather, at least no more than anyone whose day out is spoilt by rain. True, I did spend six years in Wisconsin, in the United States, where much of the evidence for the Great Ice Ages lies across the landscape, and in another way the last 30 years of my research have indeed been about weather. Not the coming and going of storms and droughts, but the effect the weather has upon rocks. You see, I am a geologist, and I was led by curiosity, coincidence and colleagues into the study of the way in which rocks become soil – mineral weathering. I looked deep into the heart of clays, photographing their relationship to the harder minerals out of which they grew with what was then the most amazing microscope in the world. On a wall in my office are images of minerals magnified to the point at which their constituent atoms are visible. When I retired, there were new opportunities to explore, from playing with grandchildren to travelling the grand landscape of Australia. And so it turned out. But after tidying up the loose ends of 40 years’ scientific research, in the longest drought I have experienced and amidst a political storm over the evidence for global warming and a proposed Emissions Trading Scheme, I received a challenging message by email. In this book you will read about where that led.

Two years of reading and writing have taken me away from my wife, Glen, for countless hours – hours when we might have been doing more of those other things. For letting me work without complaint, for supporting me and for reading and gently improving what I wrote, my heartfelt thanks.