Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
Mark Lynas

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 six degrees of the title refer 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.

SIX DEGREES

Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Mark Lynas

To my wife, Maria, son, Tom, and daughter, Rosa, in the hope that most of the predictions hereneed not come true.

From the weeping ground there sprang a wind,

flaming with vermillion light,

which overmastered all my senses,

and I dropped like a man pulled down by sleep.

Dante, Inferno, Canto III: Dante enters the First Circle of Hell

Table of Contents

Epigraph (#u0d8dd1d9-a046-5d53-ad25-7f67590549d7)

Introduction

Part 1 - 1°

Chapter 1 - One Degree (#ulink_cdc6ac19-7d32-5c9c-857b-fc1c5727963b)

Part 2 - 2°

Chapter 2 - Two Degrees (#ulink_36c19fa0-7dcf-50f8-b80c-d83cc64292b5)

Part 3 - 3°

Chapter 3 - Three Degrees (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 4 - 4°

Chapter 4 - Four Degrees (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 5 - 5°

Chapter 5 - Five Degrees (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 6 - 6°

Chapter 6 - Six Degrees (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 7 - 7

Chapter 7 - Choosing Our Future (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Also by Mark Lynas

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION (#u002bc48c-dd26-5651-a20b-e9e5578ccf07)

The knock on the door came at night. In the darkness I could see two yellow jackets over black uniforms-the police. They were going door to door, the officers explained, to warn people in the area of the imminent risk of flooding. They handed over a photocopied leaflet, advising that we prepare to turn off the power and move all valuables upstairs, and were gone.

The rain had come two days earlier. It poured with torrential force for most of the day, accompanied by vivid flashes of lightning and intermittent claps of thunder. Roads were awash as flash floods swept off fields. Within hours, the rail link north was cut, and Oxford-like many other towns in the Midlands and southern England-was marooned. Four days later the waters were still rising, as a flood crest surged down the river Thames from more heavily inundated areas upstream. Turning on the television news I saw the pretty cathedral town of Tewkesbury turned into an island, both Cheltenham and Gloucester hit by power failures, and schools closed across the entire region. The rising flood swept over a water treatment plant, leaving a quarter of a million people with no drinking water for over a week. Though my own house was not flooded, whilst writing this I can still smell the stench of rotting waterweed left behind by the river on nearby Port Meadow.

The sheer intensity and violence of the rain reminded me of a tropical storm I rode out a few years earlier on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, whilst researching my first book High Tide. There was that same ominous dark quality to the sky, and the rainfall radar on the Meteorological Office website showed the same reds and whites of super-intense precipitation that I had previously witnessed whilst sheltering in the hurricane trackers' van near Cape Hatteras in 2002. Hurricanes generate some of the heaviest rainfall on Earth, and flooding during a hurricane strike is virtually a certainty. As the terrible drama that unfolded in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 showed, sometimes this flooding-combined with a monster storm surge-can be deadly.

All these events were windows into a changing world. Global warming is making the hydrological cycle more intense, causing heavier storms and more intense hurricanes to brew up out at sea. Yes, extreme weather has always been with us, but the fact that rising levels of greenhouse gases trap the sun's heat means that more energy is available in the system-so the worst is happening more and more often. The misery suffered in New Orleans three years ago felt to me like an insight into what the twenty-first century may have in store for many more of us, in a thousand locations across the world, as climate change accelerates.

The scenes lingered in my mind even as the city was emptied and the bedraggled survivors of New Orleans and the wider Gulf region were packed off to temporary shelters in Texas and elsewhere, where half a million still remain at the time of writing: arguably the first climate refugees, displaced permanently from their homes. I kept wondering: where next? What will happen as the world warms bit by bit? With up to six degrees Celsius of global warming on the cards over the next hundred years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), what will happen to our coasts, our towns, our forests, our rivers, our croplands and our mountains? Will we all, as some environmentalists suggest, be reduced to eking out a living from the shattered remains of civilisation in Arctic refuges, or will life go on much as before-if only a little warmer?

As I pondered these questions, I had already begun to sift through the latest scientific literature on global warming. I knew from earlier research for High Tide that scientists have now made hundreds of projections-mostly based on complex computer models-of how future global warming will affect everything from maize crops in Tanzania to snowfall in the Alps. Occasionally a particularly striking study makes headlines in the newspapers, but the vast majority of these forecasts are buried in obscure specialist journals, destined to be read only by other climatologists. Most of these journals are taken by Oxford University's Radcliffe Science Library, where they sit-undisturbed for weeks or even years on their dimly lit shelves-just a mile or so down the road from my own house. I realised that it was almost as if I had a Delphic Oracle in my back garden or Nostradamus living next door-except that these scientific prophecies were already coming true.

Earlier that year I had begun to make a daily pilgrimage down to the Radcliffe Science Library basement with my laptop, where as the weeks passed by I trawled through tens of thousands of scientific papers. Seasons came and went, and I barely noticed. Each relevant article, I slotted into a spreadsheet-papers about two degrees of global warming went into the two degrees slot, papers about five degrees of global warming went into the five degrees slot, and so on. Not all were computer model projections-some of the most interesting material came from palaeoclimate studies, investigations of how variations in temperatures have affected the planet during previous global warming events in prehistory. These records of past greenhouse episodes, I realised, could be analogues for the future: and they too slotted into my six degrees table according to the temperatures of the climatic periods they represented.

At the end, I found I had something truly unique: a degree-by-degree guide to our planet's future. And so, based on this raw material, the book gradually took shape: my first chapter included all the global warming impacts I could find associated with a one-degree rise in temperature, my second chapter covered two degrees, my third chapter covered three degrees … and on up the scale to six degrees-the worst-case scientific scenario. No scientist and no journalist has ever undertaken this work before with anything like this attention to detail, and never before has so much of this information been presented comprehensibly to a general audience in book form.

As the work emerged, I felt a nagging suspicion that maybe I should be keeping it all secret. Six Degrees was beginning to feel like a survival manual, full of indications about which parts of the globe might need to be abandoned, and which would be most likely to remain habitable. Maybe I should be sharing this information only with my family and friends, to give those people closest to me a quiet heads-up? Or perhaps I should get it out as widely as possible, as a sort of cautionary tale, to convince people to campaign for rapid emissions cuts and avoid the worst-case scenarios before it is too late?

Obviously I chose the second, more optimistic course. But a related question continued to bug me as I did early public presentations of Six Degrees material, particularly when I overheard a conversation in the toilets after one event in which an audience member apologised to another for dragging them out to something so depressing. I was truly shocked. Depressing? It had honestly never occurred to me that Six Degrees might be depressing. Yes, the impacts presented are terrifying-but they are also, in the main, still avoidable. Getting depressed about the situation now is like sitting inert in your living room and watching the kitchen catch fire, and then getting more and more miserable as the fire spreads throughout the house-rather than grabbing an extinguisher and dousing the flames.

It also dawned on me gradually when I tried to explain the book to non-specialists that most ordinary people have not got the slightest idea what two, four or six degrees of average warming actually means in reality. These still sound like very small changes when the mercury swings by fifteen degrees between night and day. To most of us, if Thursday is six degrees warmer than Wednesday, it doesn't mean the end of the world, it means we can leave the overcoat at home. Such are the vagaries of everyday weather. But six degrees of global average change is an entirely different prospect.

Consider this: 18,000 years ago, during the deepest freeze of the last ice age, global temperatures were about six degrees colder than today. In that frigid climate, ice sheets stretched across North America from sea to shining sea. As glacial grooves in the rocks in Central Park attest, New York was buried under a thick slab of ice, more than a mile deep as it stretched into the heart of the continent. Northern New Jersey was buried, as was all the Great Lakes area, and almost the entirety of Canada. Further south, the agricultural heartland of states like Missouri and Iowa would have been freezing tundra, blasted by dust-laden winds sweeping down from the ice cap, and underlain by layers of solid permafrost. During the ice age, humans were displaced far to the south, where places that are now subtropical, like Florida and California, maintained a temperate climate.

In addition, temperature swings were astonishingly rapid-several degrees in the space of a decade as the climate warmed and then cooled again. At one point, about 70,000 years ago, a huge supervolcano eruption in Indonesia blew thousands of cubic kilometres of dust and sulphur into the atmosphere, cutting off the Sun's heat and causing global temperatures to plummet. Humans were nearly wiped out in the ensuing ‘nuclear’ winter: the entire global human population crashed to somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 individuals, a survival bottleneck which is still written in the genes of every human alive today. By implication, if six degrees of cooling was enough to nearly wipe us out in the past, might six degrees of warming have a similar effect in the future? That is the question this book seeks to answer.

Back in the summer of 2005, as I began my journey into humanity's likely future, I felt like Dante at the gates of the Inferno-privileged to see what few others have laid eyes upon, but also deeply worried by the horrors that seemed to lie ahead. Just as the poet Virgil was Dante's guide as he set forth into the Inferno, my guides are the many talented and passionate scientists who conducted the original research studies on which this book is based. I offer them my thanks, and hope they feel well represented by what follows.

‘Set out then, for one will prompts us both.