In all the talk about the Paris Agreement, reached at the twenty-first Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in 2015, it is sometimes forgotten that the world’s political leaders have held negotiations about climate change at the highest possible level for at least three decades. Many have known about climate change for a lot longer. It was in the 1860s that the Irish scientist John Tyndall first established a link between CO2 and what then became known as the ‘greenhouse effect’, which was further evidenced by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (Pain 2009). In 1938, the British scientist and engineer Guy Stewart Callendar “documented a significant upward trend in temperatures for the first four decades of the 20th century and noted the systematic retreat of glaciers” (Plass et al. 2010: online). In 1956, the American scientist Gilbert Plass (1956) published a seminal paper called ‘Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change’, creating a clear link between increases in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperature rises.