During the past several weeks I have been reading, with a racing pulse, some recent literature on global warming while watching, with a sinking heart, the political skirmishes connected to the introduction of the Rudd government's emissions-trading scheme. The experience of moving between these parallel universes has been genuinely disconcerting.

Perhaps the two most outstanding books on global warming to have been published lately are The Hot Topic, written by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King, until late 2007 the chief scientific adviser to the British government, and David Spratt and Philip Sutton's Climate Code Red. Were I a philanthropist, I would purchase several hundred copies of both and send them to our politicians and policymakers. As I am not, the best public service I can offer is a brief summary of their central arguments.

According to both books, there are many differences of opinion among scientists on many aspects of global warming. However, on one fundamental point there is now near unanimity: the massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, through the burning of fossil fuels that have been buried under the Earth's surface for hundreds of millions of years, is the main cause of a rise in the global temperature of 0.75° Celsius in recent decades. In the pithy words of Walker and King, "if anybody tells you differently they either have a vested interest in ignoring the scientific arguments or they are fools."

Both books make clear that, in very recent times, even since the publication of the conservative 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, alarm has grown about the pace at which global warming is transforming the natural environment. A few years ago, scientists believed it would take until the end of the century for the oceanic Arctic ice sheet to melt entirely during the summer. That now seems likely to occur at some time in the next few years. Although this will have a feedback effect on global warming - the Arctic ice is a great reflector of the sun's rays - far more ominous is what might happen to sea levels when East Antarctica, West Antarctica and Greenland, the three great continental ice sheets, begin to melt. Walker and King think East Antarctica is stable. They also believe West Antarctica's ice sheet probably is, but know that no one can be certain. Spratt and Sutton, somewhat differently, quote one of the world's most eminent climate scientists, James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, on this point. He believes that the West Antarctic ice sheet - "attacked from below by warming ocean water, as well as from above by a warming atmosphere" - is extremely vulnerable to major melting. In the southern hemisphere, the present concerns of scientists centre on the West Antarctic Peninsula - the site of the collapsed Wilkins Ice Shelf - where in recent years the temperature has risen very rapidly. If in the coming decades it melted entirely, sea levels would rise by approximately a metre and a half. In the northern hemisphere, scientific attention focuses on the vast Greenland ice shelf. Melting is increasing rapidly. Surface water is careering down crevasses, rendering the ice shelf highly unstable. In the view of Walker and King, a 3°C increase in the global temperature (something that is in their view far from impossible) would push Greenland "over the edge". This is a terrifying prospect.

What then is likely to happen to sea levels in the coming decades? "If all possible ice mechanisms add together to conspire against us," Walker and King argue, "there is a serious chance that by the end of the century the sea will have risen by a matter not of centimetres but of metres." Quoted in Spratt and Sutton, James Hansen reaches a similar conclusion by a different route. If there is a one-centimetre sea rise through ice-sheet melting in the decade 2005 to 2015, and if that rate doubles in every subsequent decade, by 2095 the sea level will have risen by more than five metres.