How many times has the climate changed in the past five thousand years? The book tells the complex and changing story of climatology, a science of nature as old as human civilisation.
Ever since the Ice Age, the effects of climate change have affected the development of cultures and civilisations. Our journey begins in Mesopotamia, where special climatic conditions led to the first flourishing civilisations, and goes all the way to the latest research on the climate of planets far from Earth.
Today, climatology is at the centre of the political and economic debate on global warming: while the climate triggered human development (rising temperatures are what made agriculture possible), now mankind is determining the climate.