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FOR around 4 billion years, Earth has been just right for life. It’s not too hot, not too cold, not too windy nor too wet. But it is also changeable, and sometimes distinctly uncomfortable.

In The Goldilocks Planet, and of the University of Leicester, UK, set out to tell the story of Earth’s changing climate, from the planet’s early days when it was bombarded by meteorites to today. It is a project of vast scope, and the authors do an admirable job of pulling together an enormous amount of information into something approaching a coherent story. But their book has two major problems.

Reconstructing past climates is a huge technical challenge. There were no weather stations to tell us what was happening, so palaeoclimatologists have to rely on a host of subtle indicators, from the chemical make-up of fossilised algae to layers of dust trapped in Antarctic ice. Zalasiewicz and Williams expertly explain these arcane techniques, but they do so at the expense of the story. Too many pages detail how climatologists find things out, instead of describing the results and painting vivid pictures of the different stages Earth went through.

As a result, a subject that is already rather abstract becomes even more esoteric. It is a shame, because the authors missed the opportunity to show how the Earth’s changing climate is intimately tied to the evolution of life. Different climates favoured different organisms, and dramatic climate change often wiped out vast swathes of the ecosystem and unleashed new waves of evolution.

The second problem with the book is nobody’s fault: for the first three-quarters of Earth’s history, there is hardly any information. Even the last 500 million years, when complex plants and animals spread over the globe, is sketchy. The slow workings of plate tectonics have destroyed most of the rock record, effectively writing over the evidence.

As a result Zalasiewicz and Williams devote as many chapters to the last 3 million years as they do to Earth’s first 3 billion. They describe in great detail the most recent glacial maximum, and the 10,000 years of stable climate that saw the rise of human civilisation, but lavish far less attention on periods of Earth’s history that are arguably more interesting, such as the dinosaurs’ hothouse climate.

The book does perk up in the final chapter, which tackles human-made climate change. Zalasiewicz has long argued that humanity’s impact on the planet is now so great that , the Anthropocene. Yes, the climate changes on its own – but we have lived with a fairly stable one throughout the course of human civilisation. Changing it, the authors say, is not a good idea.