Book Review: Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Six Degrees is a non-fiction book about climate change.  The author, Mark Lynas, looks at the scientific journals published on climate change and summarises them here with each chapter being an increase in a degree.

Topics covered in this book are how positive feedback will accelerate climate change, carbon cycle feedback, destruction of the corals and rain forests, desertification, and the specific effects of methane is having on the warming of our planet.  Perhaps the most eye opening part of this book is how a rise in five or six degrees could lead to the tropics and subtropics being completely uninhabitable with shortages in water and food, and a mass migration of billions of people to the north and south of the planets with devastating outcomes.

This book was first published in 2007 and I first read this the next year, and have read it again since.  The information described in Six Degrees is still pretty accurate to the updated information being provided by the scientific community today and, there's no point beating around the bush here, it is quite stark.  It is also worrying to realise that we have already had a temperature rise of 1 degrees (making that chapter even more pertinent to read).

Perhaps the thing that is most amazing about this book is the fact that we have known about the effects these temperature rises will have on our planet for over 10 years now and yet we have carried on as normal with our head in the sands.  It seems odd to me that we haven't made the changes we need to make to swerve away from these scenarios and are now heading into a 3 degree rises.  

This book is a definite read for everyone, if only to prepare yourself for the world we are heading to, and a good way of giving yourself an incentive to make the changes we need to prevent us from reaching the worst that climate change will bring.  For me climate change is really about the world we leave for other species that share this planet with us, but if you are all about the humans this is a very good look at just how much it is going to effect us.  It is also important to be realistic about how humans behave in highly stressful situations, and it's no always with humanity and understanding.  We really need to fight climate change now and Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet is a good incentive to do so.