Orion Magazine

The Omnicene

ACK IN 1991, I pitched a different name for this time on Earth. That was the year before the Earth Summit in Rio produced the first climate treaty. I’d been reporting on human-driven climate change since 1988 and was writing my first book on the issue. In chapter 2, I was laying out the planet’s long prehuman history of cold and hot climate fluctuations and explaining how those ups and downs interlaced with the history

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