Uncertainty is a fact of life, whether we're interpreting the past, dealing with present dilemmas or predicting the future. Science thrives on asking what don't we know and how do we go about finding the answers.

This paperback edition of Pollack's exploration of uncertainty emerges when the crucial challenge of global climate change, on which there is an unusual degree of scientific agreement, still lacks clear political resolution.

Today, we have a strengthened George W Bush, who owed his first presidency in 2000 to the supreme court decision to end the uncertainty caused when, in a close contest, a few hundred hanging chads tested the electoral mechanism to destruction.

As mathematician John Paulos put it then: "We're trying to measure bacteria with a yardstick." The question became how to devise a more accurate yardstick. The uncertainty, Pollack argues, served as a spur to ingenuity and creativity.

Pollack, a geophysicist, coordinated research which took underground temperature profiles in more than 700 boreholes worldwide and showed that the rocks have warmed by 1C overall over the past five centuries, with half the warming in the 20th century - clear evidence of global warming.

Bush is a creature of a fossil fuel lobby in denial about the human contribution to climate change. But Pollack reminds us it once was hard to accept that the simple act of using hairspray with a CFC propellant could damage the ozone layer.

Today, says Pollack, improved scientific methods make it easier to predict global climate change than the movements of the global financial markets. Yet industries that test the environmental impact of their operations have found savings in energy, water and waste-handling costs. And there are substantial rewards to be had in the sustainable energy business. A buy for the long term?

· Uncertain Science... Uncertain World is published by CUP at £12.99. To buy it for £11.99 inc p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 8360875 or visit theguardian.com/bookshop