Mark Lynas is, along with George Monbiot and Bill McKibben, the best writer about global warming working today. In Six Degrees, he does something so obvious and so necessary it is hard to believe nobody has done it before. He pores through the peer-reviewed scientific literature and describes, calmly and plainly, what scientists say will happen on earth as each degree of global warming occurs.
And at six degrees - the IPCC's higher-end predictions for this century - humanity enters its endgame. "An entirely new planet comes into being - one unrecognisable from the Earth we know today," Lynas writes. The rainforests are gone, the world's ice supplies are only a memory, the seas are encroaching, and inland cities see temperatures ten degrees higher than today. In the world's major crop-growing areas - India, Australia, the inland United States - most crops are dying, and mass starvation is a perennial risk.
It becomes likely that the vast stores of methane lodged on sub-ocean shelves will bubble to the surface. Since methane is highly flammable, these could quickly be sparked - by lightning, or through human action - into vast fireballs tearing across the sky. The chemical engineer Gregory Ryskin calculates that this methane "could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely", with a major oceanic methane eruption having a force 10,000 times greater than the world's stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
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