SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'An epoch-defining book' Matt Haig'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this' David Sexton, Evening StandardSelected as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Sunday Times, Spectator and New StatesmanA Waterstones Paperback of the Year and shortlisted for the Foyles Book of the Year 2019Longlisted for the PEN E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.Over the past decades, the term Anthropocene has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet.