Six degrees

Our future on a hotter planet

Mark Lynas, Fourth Estate, 384 pages, paperback, £8.99

Want to know the future? This book summarises a mass of scientific studies on climate change, and then describes the impact of global warming degree by degree.

After a 1°C rise, the western USA becomes a dustbowl with drought, Arctic sea ice declines rapidly and tropical coral reefs disappear.

At 2°C, the southern oceans become toxic to organisms. Every European summer is as hot as in 2003, when 30,000 died from heatstroke. A third of species are extinct.

At 3°C, the Amazon rainforest burns to a desert, large parts of southern Africa and Australia become uninhabitable and the Indus river declines to a trickle. From this point on violent climatic conditions are the norm and billions die. Siberia faces meltdown and southern Europe turns to desert.

The warning is starkly put. Sadly, the political solution suggested — personal carbon rationing — is individualistic, not collective.