Remember the “Millennium Bug”? It was maintained that computers would be unable to process the change from 1999 to 2000. Microchips, they said, would curdle in confusion, planes would fall from the sky and civilisation as we know it would cease. It didn’t happen, of course. Nor did the disasters predicted by the Club of Rome’s great 1972 work The Limits to Growth. We have not (yet) run out of natural resources.

So there is a case for believing that, as a species we are catastrophists, with some deep need within us for a good apocalypse. Is “climate change” just the latest? As mankind’s development continues, we are pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Levels of carbon dioxide are rising sharply and so, as a result, is the Earth’s average surface temperature. The polar icecaps are melting. Armageddon looms. Fact or fancy?

Flannery is a nononsense Australian scientist. His account of the history of the weather over millions of years keeps the science simple: “If the great aerial ocean is Earth’s blood supply, then ozone is its sun-screen.” Because his perspective is so wide and his context so far-ranging, his analysis is compelling – and, if it as correct as most scientists think, it is chilling. Climate change, he concludes, is real. Unless we act, it will be terminal. Flannery proposes responsive actions, and challenges us to meet them. This is a clarion call.

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