Six degrees
A well documented summary of studies relating to the effects of climate change. The chapters are organized by the effects on people, the economy,and the climate for every additional degree of temperature increase. The book is written for an educated layman and is quite interesting. Over half of the book is dedicated to an extensive bibliography which is very thorough and useful for further research.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
19mentions
7people
2015–2022years
68% recommend26% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A good place to start is the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, which has references to hundreds of papers.
Also Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren has several chapters on the geological history.
- 50% of species would be considered an extinction event, and that is absolutely on the table.
We're already in the 6th largest mass extinction event in the history of life on this planet.
I would strongly recommend reading Peter Ward's "Under a Green Sky" (or his academic papers if that's more your style). He makes a very compelling argument about the relationship between rising CO2 and many of the previous major (and minor) extinction events.
To be clear, I'm not saying "extinction is certain!" but in "the worst case scenario" mass extinction is absolutely a real possibility. If we reach the neighborhood of 5+C (which is in the realm of possibility, especially when talking about 'worst case') we're looking at a planet that is very hostile to human and most other current life.
A few books I would recommend (all in the popular non-fiction category but backed up with plenty of academic sources):
- Peter Ward "Under a Green Sky"
- Elizabeth Kolbert "The Sixth Extinction"
- Mark Lynas "Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency" (update of his earlier "Six Degrees")
Ward is an academic, and Kolbert and Lynas are science journalists, but both have plentiful, credible citations.
Again, there are so many big unknowns that very little can be said for sure, but saying that a mass extinction (and more specifically human extinction) event is not possible is simply wrong given our current understanding of the situation.
- Drought like this, driven by global warming, was predicted in the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, published in 2007.
He read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree, with extensive references. Massive drought in the western U.S. was in his chapter for one degree of warming, right where we're at now.
Given what's in his later chapters, I'm not too happy about seeing him accurate so far.
- Scientists are not saying we'll all die in 12 years. What they are saying is that if we're not rapidly reducing emissions by then, we're unlikely to avoid a tipping point where the planet is emitting its own greenhouse gases, and will take things several degrees further with no more help from us.
A great book on the effects of climate change is Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on climate change and summarized them, with extensive references. It was published in 2007 but from what I've seen it's holding up well. Four degrees is grim; it won't make us go extinct but it's a horrible mess nonetheless.
One claim in the article was that food production will be fine. In fact, there are agricultural areas feeding hundreds of millions of people which are dependent on glacier melt during dry seasons. Those glaciers are going away. Another issue is that prime areas for growing grain are moving towards the poles; the new "best" areas are smaller and have poorer soil. We're also losing topsoil, from a combination of droughts with occasional torrential rainfalls.
I can't think of any other problem that people think is fine because it's not bad enough to make us go extinct. "Bad healthcare system? Well, it won't wipe us all out, we're fine." And we're experiencing effects of climate change already, e.g. with the forest fires in California.
- Then you should read the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree.
Billions of deaths at three degrees is probably overstating things, but three degrees does bring massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of refugees. At four degrees, billions of deaths doesn't look that unlikely, and it starts getting hard to imagine how modern civilization could survive. More than that is unthinkable.
The book is a decade old but more recent work hasn't improved the outlook at all.
- The book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas is a good start. It has extensive references to peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change.
We've already had thousands of deaths from heat waves that probably wouldn't have happened in the absence of global warming. By three degrees warming we'll have massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.
I find a lot of anti-nuclear renewables advocates really underestimate the scale of the problem we're facing. This book is a great start to seeing what we're really up against.
