Steve’s bookshelf

This remarkable book from an expert in the energy field sets out, with enormous clarity and objectivity, the various alternative low-carbon pathways that are open to us. Policy makers, researchers, private sector decision makers, and NGOs, all will benefit from these words of wisdom. Sir David King FRS, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Govt, 2000–08

Download the book (pdf)

The most groundbreaking survey of the state of our planet when first published in 1984, it has become the bible of the environmental movement and definitive guide to a planet in critical transition. Fully updated, it contains a wealth of current environmental and political topics to equip a further generation of readers with information to face the challenges of the new millennium.

If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, this is the book for postapocalyptic survivors with crucial knowledge to survive in the aftermath and rebuild civilization as quickly as possible—a guide for rebooting the world. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a QuickStart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, explaining the fundamentals upon which they are built. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.

Incidents That Define Process Safety describes approximately fifty incidents that have had a significant impact on the chemical and refining industries’ approaches to modern process safety. Events are described in detail so readers get a fundamental understanding of the root causes, the consequences, the lessons learned, and actions that can prevent a recurrence. There are exhaustive investigative reports about these events, allowing you to apply the resulting safety principles to their current operations. Online ISBN:9780470925171, DOI:10.1002/9780470925171

BP Process Safety Series

A book of amazing, original cross-section drawings to take readers right inside 18 of the world’s most fascinating structures. These extraordinarily detailed illustrations, depicting the insides of a steam train, a coal mine, a castle, the Queen Mary, and more, can help people understand the vast scale of things that we’ve already made and put into context the challenges of building solutions to the climate crisis ahead.

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world’s future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.

A vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined, a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come, set in a future that is almost upon us – and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

Climate change is not a matter of gradually increasing temperatures. New scientific findings about how our planet works show that it does not do gradual change. Under pressure, it lurches into another mode of operation. Man-made global warming is on the verge of unleashing unstoppable planetary forces. Biological and geological monsters are being woken, and they will consume us. Virtually overnight Nature’s revenge will be sudden and brutal, like a climatic tsunami sweeping across the globe. No question, we are the last generation to live with any kind of climatic stability. 
In this impassioned report, Fred Pearce travels the world on the story to end them all. Most troubling, while visiting the places where the action may start: deep in the Amazon, high in the Arctic and among the bogs of Siberia, he uncovers the first signs that nature’s revenge is already under way.

An Inconvenient Truth is about former US Vice President Al Gore’s campaign to educate people about global warming, a daring call to action, exposing the shocking reality of how humankind has aided in the destruction of our planet and the future we face if we do not take action to stop global warming. This book is written to change the way young people understand global warming and hopefully inspire them to help change the course of history.

The documentary edition directed by Davis Guggenheim features a slide show Al Gore has presented over 1,000 times to audiences worldwide.

wired.com May 2016 Al Gore interview

TRIZ is a brilliant toolkit for nurturing engineering creativity and innovation. This guide supports problem-solving workshops run by Oxford Creativity, started by Karen Gadd in 1998. 

TRIZ enables greater clarity of thought and taps into the creativity innate in people, transforming random, ineffective brainstorming into targeted, audited, creative sessions focussed on the problem at hand and unlocking the engineers’ knowledge and genius to identify all the relevant solutions. TRIZ for Engineers helps unlock and realise the potential of TRIZ making the individual tools straightforward, and the problem-solving process systematic and repeatable. TRIZ turns good engineers into great engineers.

Ships are sinking for no apparent reason, carrying hundreds to a dark underwater grave. Strange fireballs race through the sky above the deepest trenches of the oceans. Something is about to show itself, something terrible and alien, a force capable of causing global catastrophe.

The definitive and spellbinding record of shackleton’s legendary antarctic expedition, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914-1917 was one of the great feats of human endurance vividly captured in official photographer Frank Hurley’s powerful and dramatic pictures created under the most adverse circumstances imaginable. one of the most remarkable survival stories in the history of human exploration. Shackleton’s men camped on the ice floes for five months before they escaped in their lifeboats and, after a harrowing five-day voyage, reached Elephant Island, a barren outcrop too remote for any hope of rescue. From there, Shackleton and five other volunteers set out for South Georgia Island and miraculously reached their destination after traversing 850 miles of the fiercest seas on the face of the planet in an open lifeboat. There they raised help, and three months later, after three failed attempts, Shackleton made it back to Elephant Island with a rescue ship. Incredibly, every single one of his men survived.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.

Whales begin sinking ships. Toxic, eyeless crabs poison Long Island’s water supply. The North Sea shelf collapses, killing thousands in Europe. Around the world, countries are beginning to feel the effects of the ocean’s revenge as the seas and their inhabitants begin a violent revolution against mankind. In this riveting novel, full of twists, turns, and cliff-hangers, a team of scientists discovers a strange, intelligent life force called the Yrr that takes form in marine animals, using them to wreak havoc on humanity for our ecological abuses. Soon a struggle between good and evil is in full swing, with both human and suboceanic forces battling for control of the waters. At stake is the survival of the Earth’s fragile ecology — and ultimately, the survival of the human race itself.