Vincent Courtillot is a professor of geophysics at Denis Diderot-Paris VII University, director of the Paris Institute for Global Physics and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

This book offers a new picture of how the Earth functions, and an entirely new explanation of the successive extinctions of flora and fauna that have marked the history of life. It explains global warming with a radical new thesis that is unrelated to CO2 emissions and therefore promises to be controversial. Instead, the author argues that global warming is caused by solar activity, by variations in the Earth’s orbit and by volcanic activity.
He shows how climate change — whether resulting from external events (meteorites) or from the Earth’s own activity — led to the extinction of a series of living species, of which dinosaurs are the most famous example. Finally, he exposes his theory of traps, the focus of his scientific work and the final link in the chain of causes of climate change as well as of species extinction.


• A controversial work by an eminent scientist whose arguments break with the dominant, politically correct viewpoint.
• A great scientific work that offers an entirely new theory to explain climate change. The trade paperback edition sold more than 10,000 copies.