The French bestseller is a bold, genre-jumping explanation of climate change and its cause: our addiction to energy

Here are some facts: climate change is real, catastrophic and anthropogenic. Global warming is not a hoax, is happening at an unprecedented rate and is not part of natural fluctuations in global temperatures over geological time.

You’d be hard pressed to find a climate scientist who would disagree significantly with anything in the previous two sentences – though they do like to fuss over the details. Somehow though, these facts are all contested outside the walls of the academy. We – and by we, I mean scientists in general – have failed to convey our confidence in these facts to the broadest possible range of people, and action on the climate emergency is weak and laden with inertia. A mega-funded, profit-driven disinformation industrial complex has done its very best to lobby and cheat and lie in contesting the facts. Political polarisation doesn’t help, with climate action perceived and characterised as a left-liberal position, the preserve of self-regarding Hollywood types and naive youths who glue themselves to roads and chuck soup at art.