In our introductory episode, Professor Degroot uses one of the great adventure stories of the seventeenth century - the tale of fourteen desperate men deserted on two tiny Arctic islands - to explain why the history of climate change matters so much today. Along the way, he shows what climate change actually is, describes how we can trace it into the deep past, and reveals why it's so hard to identify its influence on human history. The effort to recover climate's past is all about creative detective work - the kind that can uncover how a small group of men survived, and died, centuries ago, in some of the extreme environments on Earth.