Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency

Mark Lynas is a British author who is best known for his Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet published in 2007. This is an update 13 years later and it is even more pessimistic given what has happened with no reduction in CO2 emissions. Both books follow a simple, clear and calm format. Chapter 1 is a description of the world at 1 degrees. And so on up to Chapter 6. It is based on the best science available, sourced to academic journals such as Nature and the IPCC. Assuming CO2 levels continue to climb steadily, it's likely we will reach 3 degrees by mid to late century. This is game over because natural tipping points take over and society ceases to function due to widespread drought and killer heat as it reaches 4-6 degrees. show more It's also possible 2 degrees will cause this, there is no safe level from here out.

Almost every major extinction event in history has been caused by global warming, we live on a perilously balanced planet. There is no historic parallel for the rate and amount of CO2 emissions, it exceeds the worst extinction the Siberian Traps by a factor of 60 in terms of speed of emissions. And while there have been periods when the total ppm exceed our own, things are different now - the sun is brighter causing more warming per molecule then in the past, and again no historic precedent for speed and volume of emissions. Lynas ends this hopeless book with a tone of hope: do not give up. Immediately stop all fossil fuel usage no matter the cost. If enough people take this approach we will see dramatic changes and perhaps in time because there isn't much left.

I'm rating this highly not because of the message, there are already many excellent global warming books. This one stands out by focusing on the big picture without going too far into the weeds and becoming doom scrolling which can leave you exhausted and demoralized. This is a large complex topic and there is a lot to know but this gets all the pieces correct. show less

Very similar subject matter to The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, I preferred this treatment. There was much less personal pontificating (at least until the very end, where it belongs), just laying out the current understanding of what happens at each stage of warming, in 1 degree increments. While this approach can get a bit monotonous after the first few iterations, it dramatically shows the enormous difference between each level of warming, and underscores the need to do whatever it takes to limit the increase to the smallest amount possible.

An excellent prediction of future global heating and its likely effects. The book was published in 2019. I'd like to get the author's take on 2023 since this summer seems to have had the worst heatwaves so far. (Our high today is 106 F, which is still much better than Phoenix... or the Middle East.)

My only complaint, and it's minor... The author used mostly metric units. As an engineer, I'm used to converting between metric and English. And I have a good sense of meters and kilometers, but not degrees Celsius. It would have been helpful to include the Fahrenheit degrees in parentheses. No matter... I fetched my engineering calculator and kept it handy. (Yes, I'm old enough to use a calculator and, in fact, even had a slide rule way back show more when, which was a wonderful, intuitive tool.)

A highly recommended book for the brave! show less