In the A-Z of Global Warming, personal injury lawyer Simon Rosser has written a compact and useful guide, making the complexities of climate change more accessible to the lay person.

The book is aimed at the reader who is aware of climate change as an issue, wants to be better informed, wants to do something, but doesn’t know where to start. The good news is that Rosser has done all the difficult research for you and presented it in linear form.

Confused by the jargon of carbon emissions? Don’t worry, Rosser’s book is a handy glossary. Can’t be bothered to weigh the views of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with those of NASA? Still unsure why anthropogenic carbon emissions, which are dwarfed by natural emissions, are so critical? Don’t worry, Rosser has sifted and sifted again to develop an understandable nub to each argument.

As Rosser points out in his introduction, being a lawyer, this is a technique with which he is familiar. He has also injected his own chatty sense of humour, which is no bad thing, but it involves too many exclamation marks – an average of two per page, I’d say.

If there’s one element of the book that does not work, it is, unfortunately, the arbitrary A-Z structure. Carbon and carbon dioxide are up near the beginning in chapter C, but the other greenhouse gases are in G. Global temperature is in T and global weather in W, whereas these two elements above all could do with a single narrative to explain their inter-relatedness.

The subject is intrinsically global, forming a web-like matrix of inter-related subjects. The subject doesn’t lend itself to A-Z categorisation without some considerable shoe-horning.

Consequently we jump from the Amazon to biofuels and carbon, from deforestation to electric vehicles, just in the first four chapters. It makes for a jerky read, although Rosser has done his best to smooth the narrative. While we’re on the subject, why does the Chevrolet Volt warrant nearly five of the 11 pages on electric vehicles, while Better Place’s near-future plans to electrify all of Israel’s road transport (followed in short order by Denmark’s) are not even mentioned?

These criticisms aside, the book helps to make a complex body of factual material accessible to non-experts, with lists of killer facts and concise summaries, which will be useful to the climate change novice and seasoned eco-crusader alike.

But information should serve an active purpose: to enable us to make better-informed decisions, and act in more beneficial ways. If this book inspires its readers to act then it is worth more than its weight in carbon-trading futures. Hence Rosser’s most useful chapter is Y – You can help. This is a series of practical steps which will make any individual and UK business aware of what they can do – and will soon be compelled by legislation to do – to cut their carbon emissions.

Andrew Charlesworth is a regular writer for environmental website Businessgreen.com and author of a series of features in the Daily Telegraph on emissions-reduction for mid-sized companies.