Traversing science, politics, and technology, Our Biggest
Experiment shines a spotlight on the little-known scientists who
sounded the alarm to reveal the history behind the defining story of
our age: the climate crisis.
Our understanding of
the Earth's fluctuating environment is an extraordinary story of
human perception and scientific endeavor. It also began much earlier
than we might think. In Our Biggest Experiment, Alice Bell
takes us back to climate change science's earliest steps in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the point when concern
started to rise in the 1950s and right up to today, where the
"debate" is over and the world is finally starting to face
up to the reality that things are going to get a lot hotter, a lot
drier (in some places), and a lot wetter (in others), with
catastrophic consequences for most of Earth's biomes.
Our Biggest
Experiment recounts how the world became addicted to fossil
fuels, how we discovered that electricity could be a savior, and how
renewable energy is far from a twentieth-century discovery. Bell cuts
through complicated jargon and jumbles of numbers to show how we're
getting to grips with what is now the defining issue of our time. The
message she relays is ultimately hopeful; harnessing the ingenuity
and intelligence that has driven the history of climate change
research can result in a more sustainable and bearable future for
humanity.
