British author Mark Lynas adds another 'essential' book for those concerned about our civilization and our planet.
Excerpt from review of the book, “Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency” from Yale Climate Connections:
The motto for 21st-century climate science might be, “That happened faster than I expected.” Antarctic researcher Christina Hulbe suggested this to some colleagues a few years ago, and indeed the dwindling of the Arctic Ocean ice pack and the forces promoting disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet and Antarctic ice shelves have come decades earlier than expected. But other features of climate change are also showing up sooner than many climate scientists expected.
There’s a stunning example in British author Mark Lynas’s essential new book, Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (HarperCollins-Fourth Estate, 2020). It’s an update of his 2007 book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, also a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of our civilization and our planet. Both books give us a ladder of chapters, each reporting findings for what scientists expect to happen at a given level of global warming. Lynas starts with one degree above pre-industrial temperatures, a level not reached in 2007 but passed in 2016. He continues through two, three … up to six degrees, a planet so catastrophically different from the present that science can barely imagine it.
In his 2007 chapter on three degrees of warming, Lynas wrote about monster storms. A fine writer, he brought the science alive with a vivid description of an imaginary 2045 hurricane dumping enormous amounts of rain on – well, a random American city, he picked Houston. In his present book, he repeats the description, now moved up to the one-degree chapter, to remind us of what already happened in 2017 when hurricane Harvey devastated Houston.
Harvey’s behavior was an “unknown unknown.” There appears to be an increasing tendency for hurricanes to “stall” and hammer a place for days, and some kind of slowing down may also be showing up in prolonged heat waves and cold outbreaks. Some experts explain this in terms of the decreased latitudinal temperature gradient – never mind, a technical debate. The point is that some consequences of global warming won’t be imagined at all until they hit us. To be sure, half a century of scientific reports have made clear that there would be climate surprises. And since we are well-adapted to the present climate, most surprises will be unwelcome.