Overview

Earth has been running a chemistry experiment for 4.5 billion years. The lab has no walls, the reagents keep escaping, and the only life-forms qualified to monitor it are too busy arguing about plastic straws. From volcanic burps to industrial farts, every molecule of our atmosphere tells a story - one of creation, combustion, and occasional confusion. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are the four horsemen of the atmospheric opera, riding thermodynamic ponies across geological time. When they sing in tune, we get rainforests. When they don't, we get cable news specials titled ""Why Is the Ocean on Fire?"" This is not a book about doom (though doom makes a few comic cameos). It's about the weirdly elegant chemistry that made civilization possible - and the even weirder chemistry that might unmake it. Every brick, loaf of bread, lungful of air, and political argument about light bulbs can be traced to simple atomic relationships. Civilization, it turns out, is just climate with ambition. We'll travel from primordial soup to soup kitchens, from photosynthesis to fossil fuels, and from ice ages to heat waves - laughing all the way. Because if you can't laugh at your own species while it reverse-engineers the greenhouse, you're missing the best joke in the periodic table.

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