The weather has become increasingly "unseasonable". It is now generally accepted that the Earth’s climate has become erratic because of the vast consumption of fossil energies provoked by the development of human activity and, particularly, of the population, both of which have not ceased growing since the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution.
Bernard Tissot shows how humans’ massive consumption of fossil energies (petrol and coal) has dramatically increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, leading to the greenhouse effect, global warming and climatic disruption. Tissot shows that the situation can only worsen with the economic development of the two most densely populated nations, China and India, which will be fuelled by their colossal coal reserves.
He stresses the danger underlying the unnatural alliance between the international coal lobby, which is very powerful in the United States, and anti-nuclear environmentalists. He argues for the temporary development of nuclear power, since it does not provoke the greenhouse effect, for a transitional period while solar-energy-capturing techniques are being developed.

Bernard Tissot, a geologist, is a member of the French Academy of Science, professor emeritus at the Institut de Physique du Globe, and president of the Commission Nationale d’Évaluation sur la Gestion des Déchets Radioactifs.