Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet – Review
Six Degrees does a good job at simply laying out what each degree of warming will do to our planet, and therefore to us. Mark Lynas is able to explain the effects of warming in an reliable way because it’s based on what the earth has already done in the past, with a warmer climate at different times eons ago. Although many think a warmer planet may not be a terrible thing (too many arctic winters in Buffalo?), this book is able to show that unless you are some unusual type of tropical algae, a warming world would be disastrous for you and human civilization. The author explains why the hotter planet would be a terrible thing. I know a group of climate change skeptics correctly point out that in the past, the planet was a lot hotter than it is now, so what’s the great deal? The reason why global warming is bad is because our full ability to grow food has eventually evolved only in the past 10,000 years – the most steady climate the planet has seen in millions of years, and even very slight temperature expansions of just 2, 3, or 4 degrees (Celsius) would wreak total havoc on our ability to grow enough food to feed the world. Imagine the wars of a new Somalia greatly magnified to every country in the world – not a pleasant previously thought. The author probably does a better job of simply describing what even slight temperature increases would do to us – generally wreaking havoc on food production, rising sea levels, etc., than really making the case that humans are certainly creating a warmer world through all our fossil fuel combustion (showing that the warming is not portion of a open cycle). For more fundamental science on how we are warming the planet, I’d recommend The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart. If this book doesn’t scare you into eventually taking global warming seriously, probably nothing will. In some ways, I’m not that happy about simply reading this book, because it points me to the startling conclusion that given the certain time lag between really knowing and acting, our individual race is in for some very bad times ahead for the next few hundred years; all because we did nothing to slow down global warming. However, it’s better to know the truth than believe a big lie, at least we can mitigate some of the worst changes if we have the political and personal will to do so, which will give us more time to adapt to a hotter, drier world with less arable emergent land, and flooded low coastal areas.