The Emerald Planet

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The Earth's climate has been dramatically shifting since life evolved. This book reveals the crucial role that plants have played in driving and recording climatic change. Along the way a number of fascinating puzzles arise: Why did plants evolve leaves? When and how did forests once grow on Antarctica? How did prehistoric insects manage to grow so large? The answers show the extraordinary amount plants can tell us about the history of the planet -- something that has often been overlooked amongst the preoccupations with dinosaur bones and animal fossils. The Emerald Planet provides an important new perspective on the controversial and crucial subject of global warming -- for we can only fully understand climate change today by looking into the distant past, long before the rise of humankind.

David Beerling's new conclusion is that we should recognize how plants can offer us a deeper insight into our planet's history than ever before. It emerges from his engaging and accessible synthesis of a wide variety scientific research, with different strands of evidence being drawn from studies of fossil plants and animals, experiments and computer models of the climate system and chemistry of the atmosphere. As the narrative describing the dynamic evolution of climate and life through Earth's history unfolds, he opens a window on the adventures and conflicts of the Victorian fossil hunters, intrepid polar explorers and pioneering chemists.