This thought-provoking book paints an entirely new picture of the way the Earth functions, and is bound to surprise the lay reader. Vincent Courtillot offers a new explanation of the successive extinctions of flora and fauna that have marked the history of life on our planet. He explains global warming with a radical new thesis, which is unrelated to CO2 emissions and therefore promises to be controversial. Instead, he argues that global warming is caused by solar activity, by variations in the Earth's orbit and by volcanic activity.

He begins by explaining how climate is constituted, and why it has not ceased to evolve since the origins of the planet. He then shows how climate change — whether resulting from external events (meteors) or from the Earth's own activity — led to the extinctions of a series of living species, the dinosaurs being the most famous. Finally, he exposes his theory of traps, which has been the focus of his scientific work and is the final link in the chain of cases of climate change and of species extinction.

By proposing a completely new theory to explain global warming, this book by an eminent scientist will certainly arouse controversy. The ideas set forth here by Vincent Courtillot break with the dominant, politically correct viewpoint. He argues that humanity is not responsible for recent natural catastrophes, and that if our species dies out we are not to blame. Energy must be saved, he says, not for the reasons that are usually given, but because energy is rare and non-renewable.

Vincent Courtillot is a professor of geophysics at University Denis Diderot-Paris VII, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe, in Paris, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.