I love horror stories. Since I was a lad I have enjoyed reading books which have scared the bejeezus out of me. James Herbert, Dean R Koontz, Stephen King and countless others.
But this weekend I read a book that I was lent by a friend which scared me in a way I’ve never been scared before. The book is “Six Degrees – our future on a hotter world” a cold and impartial scientific look at global warming and the greenhouse effect. In the book Mark Lynas draws together all the scientific research about climate change he can find and tries do draw some conclusions about what’s in store for us in the future.
He examines what will happen as the Earth warms by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and finally 6 degrees. The book does not make a jolly read for anyone.
I know that 6 degrees doesn’t sound like much, the lower measurements even less so. After all, in the winter we may experience temperatures of -5 and in the summer +30…that’s a swing of 35 degrees, so what difference will 3 degrees make?
Well, he’s talking about the AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE, not local seasonal variations. To put this in perspective, 18,000 years ago in the depths of the last ice age, where my house in leafy Hertfordshire would have been lodged under a glacial ice sheet almost a mile thick, when human life couldn’t survive during the winter, and where the landscape was blasted by 100mph freezing winds.
This icy place was a world that had an average global temperature just 6 degrees lower than that of today. So, as we play with our planet’s thermostat things will change in ways we can barely comprehend.
At 2 degrees, life will be very different than life today, water shortages, people dying from the heat (as local spikes mean that 45 degree summers will become normal across Europe) and widespread storms the like of which we’ve never seen before. At 4 degrees the human race will be squeezed towards the poles as the great deserts spread north and south from the equator, whole nations will be displaced to new lands. The world will be devoid of much of its biodiversity and widespread famine (and consequently war) and almost inevitable. The Amazon basin will be stripped of trees and there will be no way for us to turn back the clock. At 6 degrees it would appear that human life is pretty much doomed and we may have set-off a series of chain reactions which mean that ALL life on the planet is extinguished.
One worrying thing is that these scenarios are NOT millennia away, they are going to happen in our lifetimes if we keep going as we are. Another point of worry is that IF we cease ALL carbon emissions TODAY, we will be able to limit climate change to 2 degrees. If we keep going as we are…
Anyway, I would recommend that anyone who has children, cares about the environment at any level, or just isn’t a total idiot should read this book and digest what the message is.
Sleep well tonight…you certainly won’t after you’ve read this.
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