The Burgess Shale has attracted the interest of paleoclimatologists who want to study and predict long-term future changes in Earth's climate. According to Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee in the 2003 book The Life and Death of Planet Earth, climatologists study the fossil records in the Burgess Shale to understand the climate of the Cambrian Explosion, and use it to predict what Earth's climate in the future when a warming and expanding Sun combined with declining CO2 levels eventually heat the Earth toward temperatures not seen since the first plants and animals, and therefore understand how and when the last living things will die out. See also Future of the Earth.