“IT is worse, much worse, than you think.” This is the terrifying introduction to David Wallace-Wells’s timely new book The Uninhabitable Earth.

One of Wallace-Wells’s observations is that more than half of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels in human history have been produced in the last 30 years. It’s a fact which stopped me in my tracks. It means that since the United Nations first established its climate change framework in 1992, we’ve done more damage than in all the preceding millennia.

This underlines an important point: we’ve known of the need for serious climate action for decades but not risen to the challenge. It is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of action that explains this climate emergency.