EARTH SCIENCES provides additional cross-references for various technical terms (e.g. classes of minerals) that the ECOLOGY dictionary doesn't contain. (ECOLOGY rarely seems to contain cross-references that EARTH SCIENCES does not.) Where the definitions are not identical (which is the most common occurrence when the terms appear in both books), the differences lie in the clarification of examples, the provision of additional details, rearrangement of the order of the information for greater clarity, and (where the word is used differently for non-ecological disciplines) the provision of additional alternate meanings.

In other words, Allaby incorporated the work done on this book into the DICTIONARY OF EARTH SCIENCES, and he and his co-editor on that book continued cleaning up and improving any terms used in common by the two books, taking care not to introduce silly inconsistencies.

When found in both sources, only one word out of a quasi-random selection of forty didn't match *any* of the senses listed in the DICTIONARY OF EARTH SCIENCES. However, out of 75 quasi-random terms in the DICTIONARY OF ECOLOGY, 35 weren't in the DICTIONARY OF EARTH SCIENCES, so unfortunately the DICTIONARY OF ECOLOGY can't be treated as a simple subset of the larger work.

Not surprisingly, the terms found in the ECOLOGY dictionary that aren't in the EARTH SCIENCES dictionary tend to be the more 'biological' terms, e.g. "saltatory" ('leaping movement, as of crickets or grasshoppers).

This little book makes two major contributions to the debate. First it conveys all the essential information about global warming in an accurate and accessible way, soundly based in the author's extensive experience in paleoclimatic studies. But at least as important is the way in which it engages with climate change scepticism, showing how it is based in real scientific argument as well as self-serving dismissal. The arguments of sceptics are fairly represented, with some points frankly conceded and other rebutted with the help of the latest scientific evidence. But as well as arguing the specific claims, the author shows how the debate reflects deeper divisions between participants regarding conceptions of nature and risk. So for example sceptics might view nature as basically resilient, even eternal, thus discounting environmental risks compared with environmentalists who view it as basically fragile and transient. In other words, as well as trying to resolve some of the arguments about global warming, he shows how some are effectively insoluble in purely scientific terms. If you're after real balance, rather than ideologically-motivated reassurance, you can find it here.