Reviews for
'Six Degrees: Our Future On a Hotter Planet'
After I first read Mark Lynas's book
Six Degrees on a Hotter Planet
around five years ago, strong storms in the Atlantic were a rare occurrence and extreme summer temperatures in Europe were unheard of.
Mark gives a blow-by-blow account of what could happen when the earth warms from 1 to five degrees. In Josh Lacey's article entitled "
On the Ski Slope to Hell
", Lacey is "disconcerted by Mark Laynas' apocalyptic vision of the earth's future".
"After one degree, he says, droughts will probably devastate Nebraska, the Amazon ecosystem may collapse and Australian coral reefs will be reduced to rubble. After two degrees, polar bears will be extinct, Europe scorched by heatwaves and Canada packed with refugees from the USA, searching for water and arable land. After three degrees, Manhattan will be swamped by regular floods and most of Holland will be under water. After four degrees, southern Europe will be a desert and London will have the climate that Marrakech has today.
"Lynas doesn't bother going to the ninth circle of hell. Six is enough, he says. When the planet's temperature has risen by six degrees, huge fireballs will race across the sky and crash into cities, exploding with the force of atomic bombs. 'With all the remaining forests burning, and the corpses of people, livestock and wildlife piling up on every continent,' the apocalypse will have arrived. A few humans might manage to scrabble an uncomfortable existence, camping on mountainsides or sheltering in bunkers, guarding their food supplies from roving bands 'and trying to sit out the collapse.' "
With Dorian, a Category 4 storm hitting Bahama's shores this week, then whimpering down to Category 2 by the time it reached North Carolina, it pays to take heed about what's happening in the world.
One wonders how many Category 5 storms had visited the US, and it's surprising that there have been quite some memorable ones from the past years. Here's a look at some of the more significant ones in ferocity and destruction to the community.
