If someone were to approach the book at a bookstore and pick it up to browse through, I think initially it would be the beautiful pastel “look and feel” that would first catch their attention, which is soothing and pleasing to the eye. Were they to pick it up and flick through it, they’d immediately see all the beautiful paintings by Constable, Turner, William Merritt Chase, Casper David Friedrich and all the impressionists, etc..  together with many self-explanatory illustrations, all woven together in an easy-to-read and chatty popular-science text style.

It's also a bargain for £25 as it’s a hard backed book of 224 pages full of these colourful prints of beautiful art from the impressionist era.

I think the book’s most important aspect is the “call to action”…  that art is absolutely necessary for science, and vice versa, if we are to really try to save humanity from ourselves. We cannot afford to abandon art for science, nor vice versa. And that we do this in an effective, engaging and enjoyable way.

We have elevated the importance of clouds to something that that needs to be taken seriously, that we must no longer discriminate against clouds, that we must take them seriously because they may just hold the secret for the climate crisis.

The impressionists were horrified by the industrial revolution. Today, clouds continue to send us warning signs - nacreous clouds among them – exemplified no better than in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, which was painted as a reaction to the sighting of nacreous clouds – or “harbingers of doom”. These are astonishingly beautiful clouds, but at the same time they are a terrible beauty, a warning to us all of what’s ahead if we don’t change our ways.