An essential book that comes to grips with the events that will determine the fate of the Earth

This book goes to the heart of the unfolding reality of the twenty-first century: international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have all failed, and before the end of the century Earth is projected to be warmer than it has been for 15 million years. The question "can the crisis be avoided?" has been superseded by a more frightening one, "what can be done to prevent the devastation of the living world?" And the disturbing answer, now under wide discussion both within...

This book does not set out once more to raise the alarm to encourage us to take radical measures to head off climate chaos. There have been any number of books and reports in recent years explaining just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, and why it is now too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species as expressed in both the institutions we built and the psychological dispositions that have led us on the path of self-destruction. It is about our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our...

Humans have become so powerful that we have disrupted the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, bringing on a new geological epoch ? the Anthropocene ? one in which the serene and clement conditions that allowed civilisation to flourish are disappearing and we quail before ?the wakened giant?.

The emergence of a conscious creature capable of using technology to bring about a rupture in the Earth's geochronology is an event of monumental significance, on a par with the arrival of civilisation itself.

What does it mean to have arrived at this point, where human history...