The slow awakening -- 1: Gaia's tools -- Gaia -- The great aerial ocean -- The gaseous greenhouse -- The sages and the onion skin -- Time's gateways -- Born in the deep freeze -- Making the long summer -- Digging up the dead -- 2: One in ten thousand -- The unraveling world -- Peril at the poles -- 2050: the great stumpy reef? -- A warning from the golden toad -- Liquid gold: changes in rainfall -- An energetic onion skin -- Playing at Canute -- 3: The science of prediction -- Model worlds -- The commitment, and approaching extreme danger -- Leveling the mountains -- How can they keep on moving? -- Boiling the abyss -- The pack of jokers -- Civilisation: out with a whimper? -- 4: People in greenhouses -- A close-run thing -- The road to Kyoto -- Cost, cost, cost -- People in greenhouses shouldn't tell lies -- Engineering solutions? -- Last steps on the stairway to heaven? -- 5: The solution -- Bright as sunlight, light as wind -- Nuclear Lazarus? -- Of hybrids, minicats, and contrails -- The last act of God? -- 2084: the carbon dictatorship? -- Time's up -- Over to you -- Climate change checklist -- Green power.

Tim Flannery takes the reader on a journey through history and around the globe as he describes the diversity of the world's ecosystems and reveals how the earth's climate has changed, causing devastating changes in the weather, from hurricanes to heatwaves.