Product Description

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'. Picture yourself a few decades from now, in a world in which average temperatures are three degrees higher than they are now. On the edge of Greenland, rivers ten times the size of the Amazon are gushing off the ice sheet into the north Atlantic. 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. Vast pumping systems keep the water out of most of Holland, but the residents of Bangladesh and the Nile Delta enjoy no such protection. 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. Pakistan, crippled by drought brought on by disappearing Himalayan glaciers, sees 27 million farmers flee to refugee camps in neighbouring India. Its desperate government prepares a last-ditch attempt to increase the flow of the Indus river by bombing half-constructed Indian dams in Kashmir. The Pakistani president authorises the use of nuclear weapons in the case of an Indian military counter-strike. But the biggest story of all comes from South America, where a conflagration of truly epic proportions has begun to consume the Amazon! Alien as it all sounds, Mark Lynas's incredible new book is not science-fiction; nor is it sensationalist. The title, 'Six Degrees', refers to the terrifying possibility that average temperatures will rise by up to six degrees within the next hundred years. This is the first time we have had a reliable picture of how the collapse of our civilisation will unfold unless urgent action is taken. Most vitally, Lynas's book serves to highlight the fact that the world of 2100 doesn't have to be one of horror and chaos. With a little foresight, some intelligent strategic planning, and a reasonable dose of good luck, we can at least halt the catastrophic trend into which we have fallen -- but the time to act is now.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53065 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'Scientists predict that global temperatures will rise by between one and six degrees over the course of this century and Mark Lynas paints a chilling, degree-by-degree picture of the devastation likely to ensue unless we act now!"Six Degrees" is a rousing and vivid plea to choose a different future.' Daily Mail 'The saga of how, in the world as imagined by thousands of computer-modelling studies, global warming kicks in degree by degree. "Six Degrees", I tell you now, is terrifying.' Sunday Times 'Brilliant and higly readable.' Sunday Times 'Buy this book for everyone you know: if it makes them join the fight to stop the seemingly inexorable six degrees of warming and mass death, it might just save their lives.' New Statesman 'An apocalyptic primer of what to expect as the world heats up!it's sobering stuff and shaming too. Despite its sound scientific background, the book resembles one of those vivid medieval paintings depicting sinners getting their just desserts.' Financial Times 'Gripping ***.' The Scotsman 'Mark Lynas!has time-travelled into our terrifying collective future!Go with him on this breathtaking, beautifully told journey!I promise that you will come back!determined to alter the course of history.' Naomi Klein, author of 'No Logo' 'Clear, lucid and informative.' New Statesman 'A thoroughly engaging and well-researched book.' Times Literary Supplement 'Written with passion and packed with an impressive amount of information.' The Guardian 'In this highly accessible book, Lynas lays out just what we can expect with each progressive temperature rise, before stating exactly what needs to happen regarding decreasing carbon emissions, among other things. This stuff used to be the preserve of scientists and governments. As Lynas makes painfully clear, it is now our problem, too.' Metro

About the Author
Mark Lynas is an activist, journalist and traveller. He was editor of the website www.oneworld.net and has made many appearances in the press and TV as a commentator on environmental issues. He also throws custard pies at lunatics who pronounce global warming a fantasy. He is the author of 'High Tide: News from a Warming World'. He lives in Oxford.

Customer Reviews

Six steps to some surprises
It's hard to understand how there could be any climate change "sceptics" remaining. Perhaps they have failed to comprehend the long view of what the circumstances are. What does an increase in global temperatures really mean? Mark Lynas has culled the massive number of reports on the topic and here woven them into a comprehensive picture of likely futures for this planet. In this effective work, he lines out what the changes in our biosphere are likely to be over the next decades. It's a chilling account and one that should be in the hands of every industrialist, policy-maker and tax-paying consumer.

Using the data supplied by his extensive resources, Lynas depicts global and regional changes in environment due to increase over time. His temperature range selection is driven by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC's reports indicate a six degree Celsius increase over the next century. Integrating the scientific research on the biosphere, IPCC is able to review existing and past conditions and those likely to ensue in the future. Lynas synthesizes the reports to present a picture of conditions likely with each degree of heat will lead to over time. The first degree is typified by examples of drought. The Great Plains of the US trans-Mississippi is already showing signs of that dry-out. The author explains that drought in one place may be off-set by rainstorms elsewhere. Heat over land desiccates, but heat over water increases evaporation leading to greater precipitation. Even with but a single step up in temperature, the rains may be intense in some locales. This seems to be occurring already, with ravaging storms displacing many refugees. Katrina is almost certainly an example of the new environment.

As he progresses through the impact of biosphere heating, he reminds the reader that the social costs will only grow higher. If the North Atlantic Current is flooded by fresh water runoff from North America and Greenland, northern Europe may be facing a cold snap. The cooling will be brief, however, as dry conditions will move into Europe from Africa. The moving warm air will be accompanied by the Mediterranean population fleeing dried-out farms and depleted fisheries. While there remains doubt about how long it might take to shut down the Gulf Stream, the drought conditions are inevitable if the rate of heating continues unabated. Millions of people will be displaced, but whether they will find refuge is problematic. As Lynas points out, the forces and numbers involved here are so staggering that it's difficult for all of us to conceive of them in our minds. Katrina emptied an entire city, but those people were absorbed into other areas. The idea of whole nations on the move is beyond imagining. Yet that is the very prospect we, and our children will be facing.

The point of this book is that during the ensuing decades, we are all, every culture, religion, social group and government, facing a planetary disruption of unpredictable severity. That's a difficult concept to grasp, but the challenge is there and clearly present. Attempts to deny it may give us superficial comfort, but, as Lynas points out, similar crises have occurred in the past. Our civilisations weren't there to experience them and we have few precedents to draw on for planning corrective action. He describes those ancient events with clarity and concern, but leaves to the reader how the conditions might affect their daily lives. It's not an easy task, but obviously must be undertaken.

If there's a serious flaw in this book - and there isn't - the major one is the failure to assess cascade effects through time. Explaining conditions by steps of temperature is a useful and needed exercise. What's lacking is some effort to deal with the population displacement and the results of that movement. While it would necessarily be in the realm of speculation, the questions should have been raised, or where they are noted, been offered with greater clarity. Lynas' own use of language, however, is severe enough. Tackling the social questions more thoroughly might exhaust his lexicon. The human issue is, to us, the big one, but the next step in his analysis might also have prompted some actions we might consider. Several recent books, most notably George Monbiot's "Heat" address this question squarely. Perhaps it's best for readers to seriously consider investing in both. But you must also consider how many copies to purchase. Both these books need to be widely read and acted on. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Six Degrees of warming is highly speculative and I'm very thankful for that.
I did not take this all the way to the end because the later arguments stand on the shoulders of the earlier bits. The earlier bits are crumbly, and my blood pressure, normally normal, was rising faster than the Author's imagination. I am keeping this book away from my library to prevent my library getting a fever.
P. 17
In the United States, fluid inclusion data from ice core are commonly used, but I suspect the data are very unreliable. Researchers at UofT never used secondary inclusions (bubbles on healed fractures) for sphalerite geothermometry, and never even bothered with calcite fluid inclusions, assuming them worthless because of the weakness of calcite. Strictly speaking, determining whether an inclusion is primary is not possible. It is possible, however, to determine whether an inclusion is secondary, but not the other way around. Many secondary inclusions are unrecognised until set in context where they cannot fit thermodynamically and then they are discarded.
Ice is an open system simply because it expands as it freezes. Think of it this way. Ice will vacuum ambient air into its structure as it crystallizes. The trapped gasses then reorganise into bubbles. Moreover, the transition from firn to ice can take hundreds to thousands of years on any particular glacier. In the top transparent to translucent tens of metres, the firn freezes and thaws an unknowable number of times before conditions obtain to freeze it for the long term as crystalline ice.
The isotopes used for temperature determinations are heavy isotopes of oxygen and carbon; in a closed system, they proxy for temperature. In an open system, the light isotopes differentially leave the system and the heavies concentrate. In the ice core scientific papers I have from Lonnie T., the presentations include a hockey stick that has a handle which projects deep down into the ice with little variation. The bent blade of the stick corresponds to the upper end of the core where the open system prevails progressively more open toward the surface. The scientist measures the ambient temperature and calibrates it to isotope ratios of the newest ice. The ratios down the hole are then heavier and represent by proxy, lower temperatures. Hence, a global temperature curve of warming is produced that corresponds abruptly with the Industrial Revolution.
This is not the temperature record. The isotopic record is an artefact of the age of burial, degassing of the lighter isotopes, and progressive closing of the system. Glaciologists like Thompson have made a career of ice fluid inclusions, but they miss out the warm period of the Roman Empire, Medieval Warm period when Greenland was farmland and the Little Ice Age when the Alps were impassable. I am certain that the corrupt data issue is caused by publish or perish overspecialization, but the only way to ignore those episodes of geological climatic history is to cherry pick the background reading. Like the urban heating curves used by the Goddard Space Flight Institute, this database is corrupt and the student should go back to the lab in the basement or fail his Masters. Unfortunately, Lonny's bandwagon keeps on rolling. Does he know it? Only a cynic would say, "Of course he does".
P 21.
Interestingly enough, The Sand Mountains of the Rhub al Khali were formed by Westerlies blowing 100 kms an hour for 100s of years at a time. They are the Seif dunes of the Sahara (Google Earth). Seif is Arabic for sword, the long curved one. Seif dunes formed during the Pleistocene while climatic zones were compressed by an ice cap covering North America and the Alps. The Neanderthals lived in caves for good reason.
P. 29
Global warming as normal climates change is not the same meaning as anthropogenic global warming (AGW) caused by CO2. This assumption comes up as the author's circular argument all through the book.
P. 82
Wrong, not 70,000 - 100,000 years ago. I asked Environment Canada and got the answer. Polar Bears are at least 1,000,000 years old. They can interbreed with brown bears and produce fertile offspring (however, polar bears are extremely xenophobic so that intermarriage is beneath their station). Last year someone shot a dead Grizzly/Polar cross and used its picture as evidence of stress from global warming. The white bear has great camouflage for ice and the brown race does not. However, they contain the genes to go either way, and the genes have survived many ice ages and interglacial episodes with races swinging from white to brown and back depending on Darwin's whim.
P. 87
Bangladesh has added 10s of thousands of hectares of land area since the book Six Degrees of Warming: Our Future on a Hotter Planet was published. Sea level is the base level. As sea level rises (4-6 mm a year), the rivers and deltas dump their sediment and build barrier islands as a direct causal succession or consequence. This is part of progradation, the process that has formed the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains and barriers. Following the Pleistocene glaciations coral atolls rose and siliciclastic barriers grew. Subtle sea level rise just leads to nice places to have holidays. Darwin drew some clear diagrams if the formation of an atoll from a subsiding coral island.
To rise 120 metres since the last glaciations, sea level needs to rise 6 mm a year on average (125m / 20,000 years). The current numbers (UN IPCC 2-3 mm/ year) indicate the rise is slowing rather than increasing. An additional complication lies in isostatic rebound. From New York City northward including the Canadian Shield over to Hudson Bay, the land is rising faster than sea level.
P. 101 and 103
Climate Change is not the same as Anthropogenic Global Warming. AGW is (to me) the temperatures posted by Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) which includes much corrupt data from urbanized weather stations across the United States. Moreover, the GISS database no longer has updates from the Siberian stations closed for economic reasons after the collapse of the USSR. The media do not notice this bias.
P. 114
Botswana is a desert, Australia is a desert, and the Gobi and Sahara are deserts because of their positions respecting topography or global wind systems.
P. 115
CO2 has exceeded 400 pm several times in the past 130 years. It was 400 ppm as recently as 1942. Measurements of atmospheric CO2 for the past 130 years by Ernst-George Beck [Google him] show the UN IPCC has cooked the books. The measurements accumulated from the chemical literature by Beck include analyses by five Nobel Prize winning chemists. Mauna Loa is a very short database on a volcano that issues CO2. The main reason, however, could be the demise of pineapple farming and replacement with condominiums. I have never seen the promoters use a curve from anywhere else. (?)
P. 119
BAS Principal Investigator Dr Alan Haywood said,
`There are two schools of thought about past warm intervals. Many scientists suggest that they were caused by ocean currents (like the Gulf Stream) moving greater amounts of warm water from the tropics to the Polar Regions. Others speculate that increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere initiated warming all over the planet. We used the latest supercomputing technology combined with chemical analysis of seabed sediments to make a sophisticated reconstruction of past sea temperatures. If the warming was caused by ocean currents, we would expect to see cooling at the tropics and warming at the poles. Conversely, if CO2 was the cause then we would expect both the tropics and the poles to warm. The sea temperature pattern we found points the finger squarely at CO2 rather than the ocean currents. This is a real breakthrough for those of us investigating past climate - we've made a major contribution to a long standing argument and our findings are critical to understanding how climate may respond to emissions of greenhouse gases in the future'[THAT'S FOR YOUR PEERS TO DECIDE].
However, if the warming were due to another cause, say the solar hypothesis, which briefly stated is "It's the sun, STUPID", the warming causes retrograde solubility to kick in thus increasing atmospheric CO2. Do not warm your ginger ale and shake it.
P. 120
Cause and effect. Retrograde solubility (Not the only thing I ever learned from grad school). The reason Al Gore got so much attention from real scientists was this piece. CO2 trailed warming on his presentation. CO2 dissolves in cold water and evolves out of warm water. It is an effect of global warming rather than a cause. Do not warm your beer; it goes flat. I would buy the book to use as an example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.