About Eric

Eric Roston is an award-winning journalist who has spent more than 15 years covering climate change in all its incarnations—from science, to technology, finance, business, and government.

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"That's funny..."

Journalists may not wear lab coats but they do share much else with their colleagues in science—namely a drive to understand what, as specifically as possible, can we say is happening and why.

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The Central Science

"This elegant volume takes readers on a grand tour of carbon's role in the universe, from the element's star-crossed birth billions of years ago to its role in the fossil-fuel industry and global warming." —Newsweek

About the book

Since 1993

The Way We Do the Things We Do

Many years ago a writer for The Daily Show explained that the program's one-liners aren't meant to make rhetorical points. They're meant to make jokes. At every step, the goal was to find "the fastest path to the funniest joke."

That approach informed what eventually became The Carbon Age and Roston's subsequent work. The carbon atom, it turns out, is the simplest guide to the most comprehensive picture about our world—land, sea, life, and human industry. That makes climate change—far from the cartoon that it's too often depicted as in the public sphere—the most efficient way to knit together two dozen social and natural scientific disciplines into one story.

It's a story that will be with us as far out as anyone can see.