There is no longer any doubt that the earth is warming: the question remains, why? For historian Gale Christianson, the emergence of global warming is one of the most compelling stories in the history of humankind, made all the richer for having been a slowly developing phenomenon. Finding the clues to global warming both deep in the past and right before our eyes, Christianson introduces a memorable and unlikely cast of characters and events. Scientists, inventors, and other pioneers are woven into the narrativeamong them, Joseph Fourier, the French natural philosopher who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, first envisioned the Earth as a bell jar, Richard Arkwright, who launched the modern factory system, and chemist Charles Keeling, who accidentally discovered, in 1955, that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were rising. Their stories, in Christianson's crystal prose, urgently lead us to rethink what used to be called "man's place in nature."