Reflections on Mark Lynas ‘Six Degrees’: Our Future on a Hotter Planer’

Abstract

Today’s ‘global warming story’ — where the moral is always that we should calculate every bit of carbon we use — owes more to the anxious zeitgeist than scientific findings. Yet environmentalist writer Mark Lynas’ new book about global warming states that ‘None of this is theoretical conjecture’; these are ‘observable physical laws’. It takes for its metaphor Dante’s descent through the circles of hell. But while Dante was guided by the poetics of Virgil, Lynas follows the research findings of scientists; and while Dante plotted a route down through the unbaptised, gluttonous, slothful and treacherous, Lynas descends through one, two, three or even six degrees rise in global warming (we’re spared Dante’s final three circles of hell because the Intergovernmental Planet on Climate Change (IPCC) only estimated a rise in temperature of up to six degrees). . . . The events described in the book will be our future, says Lynas, unless we ‘repent’ and cut back on energy consumption. His predictions go like this: At one degree rise in temperature, the western USA is wracked by droughts: powerful dust and sandstorms ‘turn day into night across thousands of miles of former prairie’, while ‘farmsteads, roads and even entire towns will find themselves engulfed by blowing sand’. At two degrees, southern Spain will empty, with a ‘mass scramble to abandon barely habitable temperatures, as Saharan heatwaves sweep across the Med’. At three degrees, Texas is hit by ‘Super-Hurricane’ Odessa: ‘the winds from the storm’s eyewall slam into Houston, the gleaming towers of the central business district begin to sway ominously’. Four and five degrees are worse still. Then at six degrees there will be mass extinction, something approaching ‘global apocalypse and doom’. . . Each of these outcomes corresponds to a carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions scenario . . . if we want to avoid global apocalypse and doom we would have to keep within the ‘magic two-degree threshold’. . . . Lynas certainly seems to be following scientific advice. There is artistic license in the telling, but the book is impeccably footnoted with peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. Lynas spent a year ensconced in the basement of Oxford University’s Radcliffe Science Library, reading from publications with titles such as the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Geology, Earth and Planetary Science Letters and Geophysical Research Letters. For his predictions [!!!], he says that he goes 371