Lynne Jones gives an account of when she addressed a small community group in Falmouth, a small coastal town in the UK. While showing a graph illustrating the rise in global temperatures and atmospheric CO₂, a man in the audience shouted ‘You know that is fake news, don’t you?’ He continued to heckle, preventing her from speaking, and eventually unplugged her microphone. What to do in such a situation? As a good psychiatrist, Lynne Jones knows we all relate to specific human dilemmas – who hasn’t faced an awkward audience member during a talk? When problems are too big, affecting hundreds of thousands of people and involving complex science, they can feel overwhelming, leading people to switch off.

Lynne Jones’s latest book is about justice and the effect of injustice on health. Her main concern is climate change and how poorer societies across the world are paying the price for the devastation caused by the wealthy. She knows how easy it is to look the other way when faced with such difficult problems – so each chapter is preceded by a short preamble, a vignette based on a personal encounter, which brings the reality on to a human level and engages the reader.

She summarises the research evidence linking justice, health and climate change, which is compelling. Societies in which there is a large gap between the richest and the poorest do worse across a wide range of health indices; and climate change increases this effect. This effect holds true within countries and between the industrial Global North and the Global South.

Acknowledging these links, what can and should we do about climate change? Lynne Jones challenges us to recognise our own power, as individuals and health professionals. She reminds us that there are strong, evidence-based arguments for the effectiveness of activism, including challenging unjust laws. She wants to encourage us all to become activists, striving for a fairer society and just transition to a sustainable world.

Readers of this journal might worry about following Lynne Jones’s call, given the recent sanctions imposed by the General Medical Council against Sarah Benn and other doctors. They should take heart from this book; from the actions taken by Lynne Jones and other courageous activists; from the position of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which declared a climate and ecological emergency in 2021; and from the support of Michel Forst, UN Special Rapporteur, who has spoken of how professional sanctions taken against activist doctors can definitely be considered as a form of harassment, and would therefore fall within the scope of his mandate. When Michael Mann and other globally renowned scientists tell us we are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster and say they are seeking to inspire responses from citizens, researchers, and policy makers then history is on the side of those taking action.

(For those wondering about the dilemma in Falmouth, the solution was to retreat to the garden and give the talk there, with kind friends managing the door.)