Hot or cold, wet or dry, wind or calm – we register these conditions from day to day, or week to week, as weather. Average them out in a region of the globe over a whole year, and you are dealing with climate.

Yet while a change in the weather is one of the simplest literary devices, climatic extremes have so far figured in few fictions. As we move into an era in which climate change is shifting from its normal geological timescale to something perceptible in a single lifespan, this may change. But so far, most of the books which focus on climate are non-fiction.

Some focus on the broad scientific consensus that climate is changing worldwide. There is overwhelming evidence that the average temperature of the Earth’s surface is climbing. We also know that the levels of so-called greenhouse gases – especially carbon dioxide – are increasing. It is clear that increase is mainly due to human use of fossil fuels, and to forest clearance. And it is extremely likely that most of the warming already recorded is due to these marginal changes in atmospheric composition. What remains uncertain is just how far warming might go. But so far it seems easier to sketch more ways for positive feedback to operate – for a temperature rise to trigger other changes which promote further warming – than to think of negative feedbacks, which might keep things more stable.

There is no shortage of well-written accounts of this complex system. The most authoritative is John Houghton’s Global Warming: The Complete Briefing, which is comprehensive and up to date. As the title suggests, Mark Maslin’s Global Warming: a Very Short Introduction does a similarly good job, only more briefly.

Past climate change helps put current events in context, though reconstructions of the more dramatic episodes tend to be more speculative. Inviting explorations include Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth, a visit to an era when life was nearly lost in a global deep freeze, and James Lovelock’s Ages of Gaia, an older attempt at a grand synthesis of Earth history. John and Mary Gribbin, in Ice Age, argue that one particular climate shift was crucial to our own species.

As for the effects of our own warming spell, Mark Lynas’s High Tide: News from a Warming World is a compelling tour of melting glaciers, and flooded coastlines. Bill McGuire in Avoiding Armageddon examines global warming as one of a catalogue of possible planetary disasters, and offers some thoughts on how to reduce its effects. And for those who want to take immediate action themselves, veteran environmentalist Mayer Hillman gives detailed advice with an urgent ring to it in How to Save the Planet.

For imagining how life might look if we have to live in a global hothouse, Maggie Gee’s recent The Flood adds dampness and deluge to her near future tale of urban angst. She offers a bleak but brilliant vision of a society under stress. The troubles of a warmer world are also stitched into the background of Ian McDonald’s remarkable science fiction panorama of a future monsoonless India in River of Gods.

Like others, Gee has also written about another extreme, in The Ice People. Here, we have a great change which is as much symbolic as physical, and she is more interested in exploring the consequences for her characters than in the reasons for the big chill. The same is true for two of the remarkable J. G. Ballard’s hallucinatory early novels of cataclysm, The Drowned World and The Drought, and for the rising young science fiction novelist Adam Robert’s latest offering, The Snow. Although various explanations are thrown up in the course of this story, we never really discover why a sudden, relentless fall buries the whole globe under hundreds of feet of compacted snow. All these writers in their way follow Shakespeare’s lead. When Macbeth says to Banquo, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” within minutes of the play’s start, we already know he is not talking about the weather.

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