Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet – Review
Most of Six Degrees is based on peer-reviewed technical articles: this is in complete contrast to politician-reviewed or pundit-reviewed hokum that we see also often nowadays. There are two main approaches that this book contains. First, facts. Retreating glaciers, falling snow on Kilimanjaro, shrinking glacial ice fields, average world temperatures, etc, can be measured. There is no speculation required now. Second, computer modelling. The problem with this, as far as the public is concerned, is that the public doesn’t understand the idea, and consequently does not simply put much faith in it, and models can disagree. Most of the public likes things in black and white: small sound/video bites are generally preferred to longer articles with whys and wherefores and maybes. “An Inconvenient Truth”, as Al Gore described it. The book tells about a significant figure of models: some of these contradict each other in some of the details, but generally appear to agree on the basics. The book becomes the point that fixes to global warming will be painful, and too much of the public would quite believe one of the tiny minority of scientists or perhaps a great majority of politicians who say that there is not ample evidence and we need to study things longer. All of this reminds me of my younger days in the late 1950s when scientists began brightly warning about smoking and cancer. The tobacco industry trotted out scientists of their own and planted news stories knocking the notion. Some of these news articles revealed “The evidence is only statistical”, and we’re merely hearing that same argument nowadays. When the book illustrates how a glacier slowly melting has usually caused a rise in ocean levels of 3 millimeters, we should worry–but we don’t. You’ll widely read a lot about “feedback” in the book–polar ice, for example, reflects sunlight, but as the ice melts, the direct ocean absorbs that same sunlight and warms even further. There are tipping points, and they may be irreversible. You’ll widely read a lot about the result of climate changes on different shares of the world–flora, fauna, food crops, etc. There’s a lot to ponder on. One problem I immediately began to have is that I would have liked to see maps: parts of the world that would be much drier, much wetter, etc. We see regular predictions by the US Weather Bureau: for spring 2008 the Southeast will be warmer and drier than normal, the Northeast will be..etc. Maps illustrating regularly changing coastlines for, say, a 1 meter rise in the ocean level would be welcome. At times it deeply felt like I was converting about a litany of impending disasters–there will be such things, but a unique approach might have greatly helped avoid the litany or doom-and-gloom sense. Finally, what I didn’t like, and which I think hurts the book, is public speculation: the development of fascist regimes, the US successfully invading Canada, and the like. These detract from the technical importance of the book. This is a beautiful book, but it’s too depressing, since you get the sense that the public is not tring to take the raw steps that need to be taken.