‘The excellent and appalling Losing Earth by Nathaniel Full represents how close we emerged in the 70s to coping with the causes of global warming and how US big business and Reaganite politicians in the 80s ensured it didn’t happen. Browse it.’ John Simpson

By 1979, we knew all that people know now about the science of weather change – that which was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next 10 years, we had the very real possibility to stop it. Certainly, we failed.

Nathaniel Full’ about Losing Globe: The 10 years We Could Have got Stopped Climate Transformation s groundbreaking accounts of that failing – and exactly how tantalizingly close we found putting your signature on binding treaties that would have saved people before the fossil fuels industry and politicians committed to anti-scientific denialism – has already been a journalistic blockbuster, a full issue of the New York Times Mag that has earned favorable evaluations to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and John Hersey’s Hiroshima. High has become an instantaneous, in-demand professional and speaker. A significant movie deal has already been in place. It is the story, perhaps, that may shift the discussion.

In the book Losing Earth, Rich is able to provide even more of the context for what did – and didn’t – happen in the 1980s and, even more important, can carry the story fully in to the current and wrestle using what those past failures indicate for us at the start from the twenty-first century. It is not just an agonizing revelation of historical missed possibilities, but a clear-eyed and eloquent assessment of how exactly we got to right now, and what we can and must do before it’s truly too late.