Global warming defines our age. Understanding it in the context of the history of ideas offers a mirror to our times…

The Age of Global Warming answers these questions and more:

• Why nineteenth-century predictions of eco-doom, which turned out to be wrong, are still believed
• How the First Environmental Wave came crashing down during the economic crisis of the 70s
• Why, amid renewed economic growth in the 80s, a Second Wave emerged – global warming finding an unlikely political champion in Margaret Thatcher as a result
• How science became the spear-carrier of the environmental movement and global warming its most powerful argument
• Why politics came to settle the science in the 90s, the world’s governments agreeing to the UN climate change convention at the Rio Earth Summit – and why the developing world’s opposition resulted in an unprecedented humiliation for the West at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009