I’ll admit it: I’m one of the people who occasionally — OK, probably more often than that — hears the words “climate change” on the news and suddenly finds something to daydream about. Or remembers something I need to look for in the other room. Or decides it would really be nice to listen to some music for once. It’s not that I don’t care about the fate of the known world, really. It’s more that I have a vague sense that it’s all just slightly over my head. And then of course, there’s the sheer despair. Contemplating the fact that the dinner you’re cooking — the hamburger from the methane-producing cattle, the carbon-fueled stove, the non-compact-fluorescent light bulb in the kitchen — is leading us all into total obliteration can wreck a pleasant family evening.

What would be nice is if a brilliant geophysicist, maybe one who’d spent decades traveling the world conducting scientific research, helped win a Nobel Peace Prize for sounding the alarm on climate change, had the soul of a teacher and — hey, if we’re dreaming — told fabulous stories, would write a book. Wouldn’t we all be better off if there was one good volume of marvelously-credentialed science, covering the entire known history of world climate with serious smarts and peppered with entertaining anecdotes (I’m not kidding about this — we don’t get past page three before we pay an accidental visit to a nude beach), and maybe organizing the whole issue in such a way as to take the, er, overheated politics out of the debate?

Henry Pollack must have thought so when he wrote “A World Without Ice” (Avery). The University of Michigan professor was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, and in this book he takes the volumes of scientific evidence presented there and delivers it to those of us without Ph.D.s.

And he does it in a unique way: as the title suggests, this vast journey through space and time is centered on the question, “What would happen to humans if all the ice melted?” It’s a simple question in which to frame complex data, and even better, it sidesteps any of the rhetoric that often plagues conversations on this topic. “Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates,” Pollack notes in the book. “It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it changes from solid to liquid. It just melts.”

This means, he added by phone before beginning his book tour, that “ice is a very neutral indicator of climate change. So if you don’t believe in weather station records or satellite this or that — there’s been a lot of debate — ice is easy to believe. I like ice as an indicator. But it’s also a big component of the earth’s climate, because it reflects so much sunlight. If you lose ice, you start to absorb that sunlight, so losing ice amplifies climate change. It’s an important part of the system as well.”

Pollack started taking the earth’s temperature years ago, for research reasons that had nothing at all to do with climate change; his work involved measuring the amount of heat coming out of the earth’s crust. Eventually, however, the team began to realize that part of the temperature’s “signature” reflected changes in the atmosphere. “So we started interpreting part of our temperature records in terms of climate change,” he explained, “and then comparing what the rocks were telling us with what the weather stations on the surface were telling us.” When the data proved to corroborate one another, they realized that they were sitting on a wealth of it. They began presenting it to the scientific community, it got included in more analyses, Pollack was asked to contribute a chapter to the IPCC on reconstructing past climates, and the rest is history.

If only it were that easy to convince the rest of the populace. At one point this gentleman whose demeanor suggests nothing so much as good-natured charm refers to us as “scientifically illiterate,” which was slightly jarring in the context of his otherwise pleasantly professorial narrative. Does he really think that of us?

“I do, and it puzzles me a bit,” admitted Pollack. “The scientists are so certain of the changes that are taking place — not to say that they’re unanimous, they never are — but the great preponderance of evidence and interpretation of the evidence says the that climate is changing and humans are a part of the change. So it’s so obvious to the scientists, and it puzzles them that this isn’t obvious to the mainstream public.”

Some of this is due to what he calls “natural reasons”: We see ourselves and our fellow species members so clearly outmatched by our environment every time there’s an earthquake, flood, tornado, tsunami, landslide or hurricane that it’s incredibly difficult to see ourselves as agents acting on the larger world. The difference, though, is in the numbers — namely, seven billion of us and counting. “We’re small as individuals, but very powerful collectively. I devoted a whole chapter to what humans are doing to the planet, and I wanted to make those very long and comprehensive because people don’t realize all they’re capable of.”

But Pollack makes no bones about another factor that hinders Americans in particular when it comes to accepting climate change, and it has nothing at all to do with the natural world: propaganda from the powerful carbon-based fuel industry that has tried to obscure the issue and raise doubt. 

“The public has been vulnerable to this purposeful confusion,” he commented. And this is where the dry, agenda-less facts of science run directly into the agenda-focused, fluid facts of politics (remember “Drill, baby, drill” and “Invent, baby, invent” from the 2008 presidential campaigns?) — to the detriment of finding a solution. Pollack recalls a talk radio interview he did once in which a caller said, “I don’t believe in any of this stuff. I think this is all political.”

“I said, ‘There are no Democratic floods or Republican hurricanes. You ought to be listening to nature.’ And that just ended that conversation right there. People have to understand that this isn’t a political phenomenon. There are political responses, but it’s a natural phenomenon. And we’re having trouble figuring out our responses to it.”

To whom does that “we” refer? This book is a journey of immense proportions — to Antarctica, the Cold War, the bottom of the sea, Venus, the beginnings of Homo Sapiens, the major rivers and mountains of the world, the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, the Mesozoic era, the financial meltdown of 2008 and a 50-mile-an-hour flood from what’s now Montana to the Pacific Ocean, to name a few — and the travelers in question are our species as a whole. Pollack writes, “What might arguably be called our greatest success — the creation and distribution of almost seven billion of us around the world — is also the root of our greatest challenge. It is not altogether clear that the human race has the vision, determination, or discipline to meet the self-created challenges of climate change and rising seas, or to make the choices that will preserve the social structure that we call civilization.” 

Ouch. “We” better get to work.

"A World Without Ice" is available in stores on Oct. 15, and Henry Pollack will read from and sign it at the downtown Borders at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 22. You can also hear him on National Public Radio's "The Diane Rehm Show" at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 20, on WUOM (91.7-FM).

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer who covers books for AnnArbor.com.