Dr Paul Young is a lecturer in the Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University. Carbon dioxide is the most important cause of human-driven climate change, but it is rather inert and boring from the point of view of a chemist. In this talk I will present how more reactive gases have contributed to recent climate change, including those from car exhausts, factories, and your old fridges and aerosol cans that also cause air pollution and destroy the ozone layer. We will also see the importance of atmospheric chemistry in the web of connections and interactions between life, land and the oceans, that all make up the Earth system. Finally, I will discuss everything we need to consider if we want to understand what the future might hold for our atmosphere and climate.