Start with the 'Truth'

You've started your exploration of global warming with the Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." The film, by most accounts, is exceptional, and worthy of the Academy Award it won, even if the Oscars are overrated. Now you want to learn more. Not only that, you want to learn more by reading books.

What do you start with? Try these:

1. "An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It" by Al Gore

The familiar author offers a familiar title in his companion book with the film. The book expands the film and offers additional explanations to complement the film.

2. "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth" by Tim Flannery

Like Gore's film, critics were supportive of Flannery's book. The Globe and Mail said, "This authoritative and maddeningly important book will fuel dinner arguments, spark school debates and rudely challenge the self-satisfied truffle-eaters and climate deniers among Calgary's oil elite."

3. "Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change" by Elizabeth Kolbert

From the back of the book: ". In what began as groundbreaking three-part series in the" New Yorker," for which she won a National Magazine Award in 2006, Kolbert cuts through the competing rhetoric and political agendas to elucidate for Americans what is really going on with the global environment and asks what, if anything, can be done to save our planet." You can also substitute "Americans" in that last sentence, with "Canadians."

4. "Earth In The Balance" by Al Gore

Before Gore's documentary was released, (O.K., way before that), in 1992, the former U.S. vice president wrote this book on the environment. And because Gore seems to know what he's writing and talking about, this book deserves at least a flip of its pages.