Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis - SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION WRITING (Paperback) - Alice Bell

The history of climate change research - how the world became addicted to fossil fuels, how we discovered that electricity may be our saviour, and how renewable energy is far from a 20th-century discovery. Did you know the link between carbon dioxide and global warming was first suggested in the 1850s? Climate change books are usually about the future, but Our Biggest Experiment turns instead asks how did we get into this mess, and how and when did we work out it was happening? Join Alice Bell on a rip-roaring ride through the characters, ideas, technologies and experiments that shaped the climate crisis we now find ourselves in. From an emerging idea of 'greenhouse gases' in the 19th century and, via scientific expeditions across oceans and ice caps and into space, the coining of the term 'global warming' in the 1970s, Bell explores how we began to realise that not only could human pollution dangerously warm the climate, but that it was already doing so. Drop by the first climate talks, weather forecasts and early experiments. Watch excitement over solar and wind power start in the 1870s, only to be forgotten before being rediscovered a century later. See the monster of big oil slain by a plucky investigative journalist back in the 1910s, only tore-emerge more powerful than ever. However, this isn't a simple story with exploitative fossil-fuel baddies on one side and the goodies of renewable energy, environmentalism and climate science on the other. It's more complex than that. As citizens of the 21st century, we've been left an almighty mess, but as this ultimately hopeful book argues, we've also inherited the tools for our survival.

About the Author

Alice Bell is a researcher, campaigner and writer based in London, specialising in the politics of science, technology, environment and health. She was a co-director at the climate change charity Possible for several years, working on a range of projects from community tree-planting events to solar-powered railways. She has a PhD in science communication from Imperial College, where she also held a lectureship in science communication and launched an interdisciplinary course on climate change. Alice has also worked at the University of Sussex's Science Policy Research Unit, City Journalism School, the Science Museum and as a freelance writer and editor. She has written for a host of publications including The Times, The Observer and New Humanist, researched the 1970s radical science movement for Mosaic magazine, co-founded the Guardian's science policy blog, and edited the 'magazine for the future', How We Get to Next.