Our final manuscript for this new book, co-written with Sarah Dry and a spin-out product from the Leverhulme ‘Making Climate History’ project, is now in production with Princeton University Press. Our short marketing blurb for the book is here:

“This book tells the history of global temperature, a hugely consequential number which shapes global politics and our visions for the future. Our history shows how scientists constructed an empirical global temperature index that passed the test of scientific credibility and thus held political utility. It also shows that its emergence as a policy metric was not inevitable: other measures of the health of the world’s climate were, and still are, possible.“