Charles Mountbatten-Windsor BA, known for being heir to the throne and his barmy views on intensive agriculture and homeopathy, has teamed up with Tony Juniper BSc, an environmental activist, and Dr Emily Shuckburgh, an atmospheric scientist, to write a book, the Ladybird Book of Climate Change. There are 24 1-page chapters plus 24 pages with illustrations. The text is simpler than the typical report on a football match.

Simplicity is a virtue. Readers who want more thorough-going fare on climate have plenty to choose from. This book, however, does not just omit irrelevant detail. Rather, it tells only one side of the story.

The book is brief on our limited understanding of the climate system and our inability to project key aspects of future climate change with any confidence, particularly rainfall. Parts of climate science are controversial and contested. Communicators of climate science often pretend otherwise, but the climate debate is polarized nonetheless. Selective omission breeds distrust. And, indeed, the Crown Estate has a lot of money invested in renewable energy.

The authors argue that all impacts of climate change are negative. Forgotten are the costs of heating homes in winter, and traffic disruptions, and that rather more people die in cold weather than in hot. Forgotten too is that more carbon dioxide in the air makes plants grow faster and more tolerant of drought. While most research finds that the negative impacts dominate the positive impacts, omitting the latter is simply dishonest.

The book gives short shrift to the human ability to adapt. People thrive in the tropics and near the poles. Humankind made it through the last ice age and the rapid warming that followed with rather primitive technology. We are an adaptable species. The authors note that a city like London can protect itself against sea level rise – although decisions will need to be made a bit more quickly than about the expansion of Heathrow. Poorer cities would not be able to defend itself. This view ignores coastal protection of centuries and millennia past. It also ignores economic development: A country like Bangladesh will soon be richer than the Netherlands when it started building serious dikes. That was in 1850. We have since invented draglines and computers and other things that make dike building so much better.

Climate policy gets an equally superficial and one-sided treatment. Greenhouse gas emission reduction would be without cost or sacrifice. In alternative fact, climate policy would be good for health, for jobs, for social cohesion, for motherhood, and for apple pie – even if there were no climate change. Unfortunately, the authors do not explain why so many people voluntarily burn fossil fuels, even pay for the privilege.

The book skims over the difficulties of reaching agreement, both nationally and internationally, on how emissions should be cut and by how much. It assumes that future political leaders will simply obey the orders of current ones.

In short, the Ladybird Book presents climate change as a simple and well-understood phenomenon, with devastating impacts, and a costless if not beneficial solution. If this were remotely true, the climate problem would have been solved thirty years ago.

The book steers clear of the moral dilemmas that plague climate policy. Greenhouse gas emission reduction is an investment with an uncertain return in the future. Energy will be more expensive, which especially hurts the poor. The main beneficiaries are people in poor countries, but development aid and trade reform may bring greater benefits for the same investment. These are tough questions.

The Prince of Wales and co-authors missed an opportunity. Theirs is not a simple but a simple-minded account of climate policy. The uninitiated will walk from this book with a poor, skewed and incomplete understanding. If you were convinced already of the urgency of climate policy, this book will neither teach you anything new nor strengthen your belief. If you were unconvinced, the book is easily dismissed as the uninformed ramblings of a none-too-bright heir to a great fortune. In fact, the book is so easily dismantled that it may win a few over to the – mistaken – belief that climate change is a ploy by the establishment to fleece the common people.