The action of most of the book takes place in Antarctica. Chandler, who has twice been granted fellowships by the Australian Antarctic Division, has made full use of her opportunities. She knows how best to lift a seal (if required), how to escape from an aircraft ditched in dark water, and how to cope with an Antarctic toilet, or lack thereof. Stationed at Casey, she took the opportunity to visit Law Dome and Bunger Hills. Other trips to tropical places provide for comparison and contrast: to the research site at Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef, and some Earthwatch field trips.

The trip to Law Dome gave Chandler the opportunity to participate in ice core drilling and to insert herself in the process. She labelled her initials J.C. on one core of the twelve samples they obtained. The story weaves in memories of an earlier meeting with the ninety-four-year-old Phillip Law (after whom Law Dome is named), the activities of the day of the visit, and conversations past and present with glaciologists about the meaning of their work in an era of global warming. Research at Law Dome has contributed to evidence of a twenty per cent decline in sea ice extent since 1950. Information about past temperatures, winds, ocean biology, and atmospheric conditions is extrapolated from ice cores to form predictions of future changes in carbon dioxide concentration in sea and air. The scientists give her their papers and reading lists, which she diligently works through as she does her homework at the end of the earth.

With a group researching minke whales, Chandler travelled from Casey to stay in the field at Bunger Hills. She evokes for us this place where bare rock rises out of the surrounding ice and snow as an island of a thousand square kilometres of peaks and freshwater lakes. From Bunger Hills, she takes a midnight walk to visit an abandoned Russian base, ‘Oazis’, built in 1955 and used sporadically ever since, whether for science, mineral exploration, Cold War posturing, or in preparation for a mission to Mars. Skilfully, Chandler brings these multiple meanings of Antarctica together as she writes about a strange walk to a very strange place, to huts where Morse code equipment sits idle among the tins of pickles. A military tank lies abandoned in a bog.

Chandler is good with the specific details that point to contradictions in modern life. On her return by ferry from Heron Island, where coral reefs are suffering from increasing acidification of the ocean, she enters the port of Gladstone with its huge coal supertankers. She moves from one place where the destructive consequences of the burning of fossil fuels is fast becoming apparent, to another port busy exporting the stuff. A taxi driver says of the coal terminal, ‘At night it’s so lit up it looks like a city.’ Chandler doesn’t pursue this. She deplores the human dependence on burning fossil fuels, and quotes Guy Pearse’s damning exposé of the Australian ‘Greenhouse Mafia’ (High and Dry, 2009). I can see what the scientists are up against here. It is not just against people being irrational, or blinkered, or viciously nasty (which they certainly can be) in reaction to information of impending disaster. Scientists are also up against people who find technology thrilling.

Chandler writes movingly of transient attempts ‘to hold gifts of earthly splendour’, and I am on her side. But others find their meaning in life in fighting for scarce resources. Chandler reports from war zones where she sees the technology of military might. She writes: ‘I try to imagine harnessing all that momentum and money and bloody-minded focus to the cause of stopping climate change.’ She includes a lengthy interview with outspoken reef expert Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who says that in order to achieve success, ‘We might have to go on a war footing’, combining all human resources for survival.

The brief survey of the history of understanding greenhouse warming might have included some mention of specifically Australian material. I remember the conference ‘Greenhouse 87: Planning for Climate Change’, when CSIRO scientists from all divisions came together to present papers on the impact of warming in the (then) immediate future. Scientists urged immediate action. The Hawke government agreed and sponsored a huge public awareness campaign, Greenhouse ’88, which culminated in a rock concert in Darwin. The now-disbanded Commission for the Future played a large part in the public communication of greenhouse science. I seem to recall that Phil Noyce, then its director, took his guitar into Victorian primary schools and sang about greenhouse warming. Were they doing this anywhere else in the world then? I think, in this, we were unique.

Chandler travels in search of meaning. When she presses her informants for the personal meaning of their work, she gets various responses. An astronomer turned glaciologist replies for many when he says, ‘I enjoy applying knowledge to something that is of pressing human concern.’ The meteorologist Tod Iolovski says, ‘I came to the conclusion that life actually has no meaning whatsoever … The only thing that gives meaning to life is what you do everyday.’ I can imagine Chandler interviewing Voltaire in the eighteenth century, and puzzling her way through the disjunction between accepted theology and everyday experience. Voltaire’s Candide is repeatedly told how ‘everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’, while in his travels he finds evidence to the contrary in war, disease, famine, and the Spanish Inquisition. Similarly, Chandler finds an increasing disjunction between the everyday belief that ‘she’ll be right’ and the increasingly compelling evidence on the scientific side that, no, she won’t.

Wisdom is one thing, communicating it is another, and the third step, using wisdom to change the world for the better, is yet to happen in coping with climate change. Chandler’s work is infused with a love of the natural world, the thrill of the search to understand it, and anger at how we are coping with man-made change. Here we are, dithering at best, or engaging in criminal deception at worst. Wouldn’t it be nice to find people who have the science, can apply it for positive change, and are proved right? I think this state of affairs is called Utopia.

There is one amusing typo. The extreme weather events of early 2011 are referred to as ‘apocryphal’, rather than ‘apocalyptic’. If only.