[MCN] Brief book review: Oh, what a punchline

[Matt Clifford]

I will be on the road with limited coverage from Tuesday October 27 through Friday October 30.  I will respond to your message when I return.

Best,

Matt Clifford

On Oct 30, 2015, at 11:22 AM, Lance Olsen via Missoula-Community-News <missoula-community-news at bigskynet.org> wrote:

> Some have been excoriating National Geographic for the space, ink and photography it's been giving to the amount of climate change caused by combustion of coal, oil and gas.  Among other such sins, Nat'l Geo published a book, Six Degrees, by Mark Lynas.
> 
> It's been a while, but I remember Six Degrees as a pretty dry read, mostly matter of fact, describing what scientific sleuths have found out about the consequences of increasingly hotter times. Some of this is now everyday stuff, with increasingly widespread coverage of the necessity, even considerable urgency, of avoiding a situation where we push the worldwide average heat to 2 degrees Celsius -- about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit -- hotter than it was in pre-industrial times.
> 
> Chapter by chapter, Lynas takes the analysis further than the usual media fare. He lays out the tedious detail of possible and plausible outcomes of getting to 2C, 3C, 4C, 5C, and C. His punchy punchline is that just getting to 2 could lock us in to 6.
> 
> After he's taken readers through six chapters of dry description, here's his paragraph-long punchline:
> 
> "If  Š   we cross the 'tipping point' of Amazonian collapse and soil carbon release that lies somewhere above two degrees, then another 250 ppm of CO2 would pour into the atmosphere, yielding another 1.5C (2.7F) of warming and taking us straight into the four-degree world. Once we arrive there, the accelerated release of carbon and methane from thawing Siberian permafrost will send even more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, driving yet more warming, and perhaps pushing us on into the five-degree world. At this level of warming,   Š   organic methane hydrate release becomes a serious possibility, catapulting us into the ultimate mass extinction apocalypse of six degrees. The lesson is as clear as it is daunting: If we are to be confident about saving humanity and the planet from the worst mass extinction of all time, worse even than that at the end of the Permian, we must stop at two degrees."
>  
> Mark Lynas. Six Degrees. 2008. National Geographic Society by arrangement with HarperCollins. P.276
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