We live in a world that is increasingly vulnerable to climatic shocks - affecting agriculture and industry, government and international trade, not to mention human health and happiness. Serious anxieties have been aroused by scientists warning of dire perils that could result from upsets of the climatic regime. In this book, Hubert Lamb examines what we know about climate, how the past record of climate can be reconstructed, the causes of climatic variation, and its impact on human affairs now and in the historical and prehistoric past.

First published between 1966 and 1988, the four volumes in this collection demonstrate the immense breadth and depth of work on climate change by the pioneering English climatologist Hubert Lamb.