About the Author

Part One

Nowadays everyone is interested in the weather. It’s not surprising, of course, given the fears about global warming, but if you’re to have any hope of understanding the arguments about climate change you really need to know a bit about how the atmosphere works. And that’s where I come in. I write books trying to explain weather and climate. Most of them are aimed at students, but writing a book is like talking inside your head to people you can’t actually see, and I like to think I’m talking to anyone who’ll listen, no matter what their age. After all, you’re as young or old as you think you are. Aren’t you? The atmosphere is a marvellous, beautiful, fascinating, exciting place, where amazing things happen. It’s a lot more fun than all those doomy tales of global warming and greenhouses make it sound and I enjoy telling stories about it. You could buy a book, just to test the water. Find out what happened to the naval task force that turned the wrong way and sailed into a typhoon by mistake. Find out what makes a typhoon. Read about what it’s like to be lost in the whiteout of a blizzard. And about the tornado that dropped a school bus on to the school stage. If you like the book, it proves you are young at heart. Honest.

Weather and climate aren’t the only subjects I write about, fun though they are. I also write about plants and animals, forests, grasslands, and deserts.

Science is about finding answers. Our understanding grows as knowledge accumulates over the years. In other words, the science has a history of its own. In explaining how some aspect of the environment works, where I can I like to describe how that explanation developed. Recently I wrote a seven-volume series of books on the history of environmental science. The series is called Discovering the Earth. The first few titles have appeared and the remainder will be following later. I finished writing them some time ago. At present I’m working on a ten-volume series called Weather Science, but they’ve not yet been published.

As well as books on various aspects of environmental science, I also write and compile reference books. I’ve written a two-volume Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate, which recently appeared in a fully revised edition, and the Facts On File Handbook of Weather and Climate, both published by Facts On File. I’ve edited or co-edited seven science dictionaries. Four of them, published by Oxford University Press, are in their second or third editions.

You may have guessed, correctly, that I’ve been writing books for rather a long time — a little more than thirty years, in fact. Before that I did other things. I, too, have a history.

I think I wrote my first story when I was about six or seven. It was about derring-do detectives, all of it stolen, and my Grannie stitched the pages together to make a book. My ambition then was to be either an actor or an author. Really I wanted to be both, so I could stand on the table declaiming my deathless prose to an admiring audience. Fortunately for the world it never happened, at least not quite like that. I did become a professional actor, though, and now I’m an author, so it all worked out more or less.

Part Two >