six degrees our future on a hotter planet

But the biggest story of all comes from South America, where a conflagration of truly epic proportions has begun to consume the Amazon…Īlien as it all sounds, Mark Lynas's incredible new book is not science-fiction nor is it sensationalist. The Pakistani president authorises the use of nuclear weapons in the case of an Indian military counter-strike. Its desperate government prepares a last-ditch attempt to increase the flow of the Indus river by bombing half-constructed Indian dams in Kashmir. Pakistan, crippled by drought brought on by disappearing Himalayan glaciers, sees 27 million farmers flee to refugee camps in neighbouring India. Meanwhile, in New York, a Category 5-plus superstorm pushes through the narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn, devastating waterside areas from Long Island to Manhattan. Vast pumping systems keep the water out of most of Holland, but the residents of Bangladesh and the Nile Delta enjoy no such protection. Displaced victims of North Africa's drought establish a new colony on Greenland's southern tip, one of the few inhabitable areas not already crowded with environmental refugees. On the edge of Greenland, rivers ten times the size of the Amazon are gushing off the ice sheet into the north Atlantic. Picture yourself a few decades from now, in a world in which average temperatures are three degrees higher than they are now.

Carbon cycle feedbacks, the demise of coral, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and extreme desertification are also described, with five or six degrees of warming potentially leading to the complete uninhabitability of the tropics and subtropics, as well as extreme water and food shortages, possibly leading to mass migration of billions of people.An eye-opening and vital account of the future of our earth and our civilisation if current rates of global warming persist, by the highly acclaimed author of ‘High Tide’. The book explains how the release of methane hydrate and the release of methane from melting permafrost could unleash a major extinction event. Special coverage is given to the positive feedback mechanisms that could dramatically accelerate climate change.

The effects are also compare to paleoclimatic studies, with six degrees of warming compared back to the Cretaceous. The second chapter describes the effects of two degrees average temperature and so forth until Chapter 6 which shows the expected effects of six degrees (°) average global temperature. The first chapter describes the expected effects of climate change with one degree (☌) increase in average global temperature since pre-industrial times.

Six degrees our future on a hotter planet