While I envision www.TheEarthConnection.org largely as a source of inspiration and nourishment, I feel so strongly about global warming that I also want to use this site to sound the alarm.  As I seek to educate myself on the subject, it is becoming clear to me that global warming is truly a PLANETARY EMERGENCY, the likes of which we have never faced before.  Perhaps the scariest thing about global warming is that it is accelerating rapidly.  Many scientists believe that if we don’t act decisively–and soon, we face a horrifying future. 

     So, believing that we all need to educate ourselves so that we can effectively address global warming, I am reprinting here a review of the book SIX DEGREES:  OUR FUTURE ON A HOTTER PLANET by Mark Lynas.  The review, written by Hillary Rosner, was published in the March-April 2008 issue of AUDUBON.

Though the visible impacts of global warming are adding up, much of what we’ve set in motion still lies ahead. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts global average temperature increases of between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, depending on whether—and by how much—we can rein in greenhouse-gas emissions in the meantime. But what exactly does that mean? What happens if the planet warms one or two or five degrees? To most people, higher temperatures on their own do not seem like cause for concern. “To most of us,” writes Mark Lynas, a British journalist whose previous book was High Tide: News From a Warming World, “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.” But to Lynas, who read “tens of thousands” of scientific papers on climate change and distilled them into a readable 300-page book, six degrees is nothing less than apocalyptic.

Lynas has arranged his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by degree of temperature increase, using this peer-reviewed research as a road map to a future earth. As Lynas writes, despite the occasional finding that makes headlines, the bulk of the projections about climate change “are buried in obscure specialist journals, destined to be read only by other climatologists.” Indeed, many papers are not even read by scientists in other disciplines unless they end up in a general research journal like Science or Nature. So Lynas holed up in Oxford’s Radcliffe Science Library and molded all the information into the mother of all synthesis reports. If you want to understand what’s in store if we don’t take drastic action, Lynas has the answers. But be warned: It’s not pretty.

If the planet warms by one degree Celsius, we’re in for prolonged drought, landslides from melting mountains, devastating coral bleaching, species extinctions, and the disappearance of several island nations. In other words, more of what we’re already witnessing. Turn the thermostat up another degree and, in just a few decades, “large areas of the Southern Ocean and part of the Pacific will become effectively toxic to organisms with calcium carbonate shells.” Unfortunately, the creatures on which the entire marine food chain rests—plankton—have just such shells. “Wiping out phytoplankton by acidifying the oceans,” Lynas writes, “is rather like spraying weed killer over most of the world’s land vegetation.” The result will be marine deserts, empty underwater wastelands where nothing can survive.

At two degrees we’ll also see a rise in deadly heat waves, like the one that hit Europe in 2003; crippling wildfires; faster-melting glaciers; disappearing coastlines, polar bears, and vital urban water supplies; and the obliteration of “a large swath of natural biodiversity.”

Suffice it to say that the horror story only worsens from there, with most of the planet becoming virtually unrecognizable, and leaving millions of humans—those of us who don’t starve to death or perish in the inevitable nuclear battles over the last remaining resources—to desperately roam the planet in search of food. The lucky ones among us could survive on tiny islands of productive land—“reserves” akin to those we create for endangered species today.

Lynas’s book can be a tough read, to put it mildly. But it’s also a gripping page-turner, a tale of ecological unraveling that would seem like apocalyptic allegory if not for the fact that it’s firmly grounded in the latest science.

The impacts themselves are terrifying, but what’s most disturbing is that once we pass the two-degree mark, the likelihood of sliding toward six degrees—or higher—increases. This is because of what Lynas calls “an unstoppable feedback of runaway global warming.” Unleash the methane locked up in the world’s oceans, for instance, and atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels will soar, sending temperatures even higher.

Scariest of all (and that’s saying something) is that in order to avoid global temperature increases of two degrees, we can’t let CO2 concentrations rise above 400 parts per million. Currently, they’re at 382 and rising by 2 parts every year, meaning we’re only nine years away from our day of reckoning. The European Union has set a target of 550. Environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth are aiming for 450. But this won’t save us, Lynas says. By his count—a point echoed in a December declaration by 200 top international climate scientists—global emissions must peak by 2015, and by 2050 they must be 85 percent lower than today.

Is this possible? Lynas wants to believe it is, though he can’t quite convince himself (“I am the first to admit that this target looks hopelessly unattainable,” he says)—concluding that it’s feasible with some drastic yet not totally preposterous actions. These include: halving the distances we drive, doubling fuel economy, covering five million acres of the globe with solar panels, constructing two million wind turbines, halting deforestation, and instituting mandatory “carbon rationing”—an intriguing idea along the lines of World War II food rationing. “So should we despair about the prospects for reaching the two degrees target?” Lynas asks. “No, but nor should we base policy on wishful thinking.” A carbon-constrained society, he argues, might look completely different than the way we live today. But unless we make these significant changes, “life will very largely not go on at all.”

The prophesies and revelations in Six Degrees are so alarming that it’s easy to simply dismiss them as alarmism. The line between these two words prompted hundreds of posts on the climate science blog RealClimate.org after geochemist Eric Steig praised the book for doing “an admirable job” of explaining the scientific literature and then raised an important question: If the sum total of all these studies is just as unnerving as Lynas makes it out to be, then are scientists being “too provocative” in explaining their findings, or “too cautious” in discussing the implications?

But while the climate scientists reflect on this, global emissions keep rising, and time continues to run out. Which is why you should buy this book for everyone you know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Insights and Visions on the State of the Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.