The Fate of the World: A history and future of the climate crisis

A warning and a rallying-cry.

'Read it and weep, or read it and win' Chris Packham

A global refugee crisis. Extreme storms. Agriculture devastated. Economic ruin. Societal collapse. These are not just possibilities but likely outcomes of our ongoing failure to stem greenhouse gas emissions — and in our lifetimes. This alarming book explains why.

The Fate of the World is a 4.6-billion-year history of the Earth, putting contemporary global heating in the context of geological epochs and periods to reveal what past climate change can tell us about our planet’s future. It highlights with unflinching realism how what’s happening now compares with what happened in deep time — and explains the devastating impacts that are now more likely than not.

Renowned expert Bill McGuire reveals that our climate already all but matches that of the last interglacial period — the Eemian — when sea levels were 6 to 9 metres higher, and that it is on track to mimic the Pliocene period, when giant camels roamed the Arctic, as soon as the 2030s. Later this century, parts of our world could be experiencing double-figure temperature rises as we continue to wind the clock back 50 million years in a couple of centuries — and without urgent preparation, our civilization is very poorly placed to survive.

Notwithstanding the urgency of the message, this is a hopeful book. The future will be forbidding, but every tonne of carbon we do not emit will make it less so. We can all do our bit, and we must.

If you read just one book on the climate crisis, make it this one.