Reddit reviews Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Continued carbon emissions are putting humanity on an irreversible course for planetary devastation. If you want to get an idea of what the real world implications we may see from the 2, 3, 4+ ... degrees C of warming we are headed for in the coming decades barring radical action, check out Mark Lynas' book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

This webpage summarizes some of the key points from Lynas' book:

A degree by degree explanation of what will happen when the earth warms

Climate scientist Michael Mann criticizes several of the claims in the article as overstated in this facebook post, though like most scientists he agrees with the general point that the consequences of climate change will be dire unless we take serious action (he has a book for non-scientists outlining the dangers and the politicization of the issue, The Madhouse Effect). And if anyone's interested in a book focused specifically on the best scientific predictions about the consequences of various amounts of warming, you could check out Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (see this post from one of the climate scientists on the realclimate.org blog, which gives it a positive review and says it accurately reflects the scientific literature on future scenarios).

I think our best chance of avoiding disaster lies in some combination of moving over to renewables and/or nuclear within the next few decades combined with massive production of carbon capture devices in the second half of the century, which could allow us to keep the warming to around 2 degrees or less. One important point is that without such massive deployment of carbon capture we don't really stand a chance of keeping it that low--check out the graphs here where the first two graphs show how fast carbon emissions would have to go to zero without any carbon capture if we want to keep warming to 1.5 degrees or less, along with a third graph showing how the decline can be more gradual if we have negative emissions later. The graphs are based on the "carbon quotas" for different amounts of warming on p. 64 of this IPCC report, and the quota for 2 degrees is not that much larger than 1.5 degrees (2900 gigatons vs. 2250 gigatons, only 29% larger) so the corresponding graphs for keeping it under 2 degrees wouldn't look too different.

The cause for hope here is that prototypes for carbon capture devices that remove CO2 much more efficiently than trees have already been built, see this article and this one, along with this interview with a physicist involved in the research where he makes the following point:

>My hope would be that we then would have a device that can take out a ton a day of carbon from the atmosphere. If you take out a ton a day, you would need 100 million air capture devices to take out all the C02 that we putting into the atmosphere today. And I would argue that it would be a lot less than that because we would also be capturing carbon at the flue stack, and not making the C02 in the first place by developing solar and wind technologies. ... There are about 1 billion cars out there. We are building 70 million cars and light trucks a year. So that kind of industrial production is quite possible. Eventually we should be able to produce an air capture device for roughly what it costs to manufacture a car.

I also think that another reason to be hopeful is that we may in the not-too-distant future achieve full automation of the production process for most mass-produced goods, leading to the possibility of self-replicating robot factories (what Eric Drexler calls clanking replicators), and I think the effect of this would tend to drive down the prices of all mass-produced goods--including things like carbon capture devices and solar panels--down to barely more than the cost of the raw materials and energy that went into them, so large-scale production of any good would be much cheaper. I talked more about this idea here.

Six Degrees by Mark Lynas. Great book, he read 3000 papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, with extensive references. One chapter per degree C.

At 3C it just looks disastrous. At 4C the survival of modern civilization starts to look doubtful. At 6C it's hard to imagine our species surviving to any meaningful extent.

A few degrees warmer is about how much we can stand. So, with that few degrees comes at least a few feet of sea level rise, likely more. So coastal areas that tend to be the highest populated, are going to need to retreat from the coast. That's going to be a huge economic burden. How is that burden born? Best left to economists I suppose....

Also, California and the west will tend to get drier, which will affect agriculture and I would venture agricultural costs. The mid-west is also slated to become drier, this is at a time when the Ogallala aquifer is being sucked dry, so we are going to be running out of a pretty precious resource in large chunks of the US. Further abroad, with melting glaciers hundreds of millions may be left without water. The middle east is supposed to also dry up. This is likely to create a humanitarian crisis.

There could be significant changes in disease distributions as well. With things like malaria, Zika, etc. becoming more prevalent in the US because of a spread of their vektors (e.g., certain tropical mosquito species).

Depending on the severity, much of the Amazon rain forest may dry out, though there is some good debate around that topic. Coral reefs laregly won't be able to keep up, which could crash some fisheries and ecosystems. Forest diseases may be more prevalent (e.g., emerald ash borer in the eastern US that is wiping out ash trees), and extinction rates are thought to spike, with 20-30% of species at risk of extinction.

Check out a book 6 degrees. I haven't read it yet, but it's on my wish list - supposed to be a good run down of the catastrphe that 6 degrees of warming will bring - basically an end of civilization as we know it. Some respected scientists think that the population will end up crashing to 1 billion in the next century..... that will cause some chaos...

>tl;dr recommend me a book

https://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/1426203853/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/1426203853

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2017/nov/03/three-degree-world-cities-drowned-global-warming

> Basically that things aren't great, but they aren't catastrophic either, and that we actually are kind of on the right path, or at least a path good enough that we'd 'only' heat the planet up another 2-3deg in the next 50 years instead of the near fatal ~8deg statistics I've seen. We could be doing a much better job as a species, but we'll still be OK.

There's a book on global warming, Six degrees. It has six chapters, one for each degree of warming. There's no need for a seventh chapter because there won't be any humans left in that scenario. According to the book, if we exceed +3°C, industrial agriculture will collapse (more or less quickly, depending on the region), and billions will starve.

We're currently on the trajectory for a warming of roughly +3.4°C. I imagine that the despair that comes with the early consequences will push down this path down to something like +2.8°C. Still, the lives of roughly five billion people are very insecure on that path. That's apocaplyptic enough for me.

Climate change is a matter of degrees, literally, and the big unknown is at what point do we really start to suffer negative consequences.

Scientists and world leaders so far have a consensus that 2 degrees Celsius is safe. Some scientists say it should be even lower, but that's what most of the negotiations are assuming. 3-4 degrees Celsius is likely what's going to happen unless we make some real aggressive moves soon, which will most likely exacerbate some of the things we see already, which are sea level rises, ocean acidification (leading to fish extinctions), melting of the ice caps and glaciers, and weather changes (drought, desertification, melting tundra). 6 degrees is where most people think we're headed if we can't get our act together and there are a whole bunch of hypotheses about what may happen then: http://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/1426203853 . Of course, then there's always the risk of runaway climate change, where we reach a point where warming begets more warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change and we eventually end up like Venus, although that particular outcome is still up for debate.

So to your point, is this all a futile exercise? I'm not sure we can hit 2 degrees, honestly, at this point. But if we hit 3, the earth our grand children (speaking as someone without kids yet) will live most of their lives in will most likely be similar to the one we live in and the one our parents live in. If we let it get to 5 or 6, then all bets are off. You might be right that they'll come up with some kind of Manhattan project to solve it, but there's no guarantee.

I'm a climate change natalist - I recognize that civilization is over and humanity might be too. Our grandkids won't have electricity and may not have agriculture. Our great-gradkids may not have enough oxygen. Anyways given the coming crash I had a kid that I'm raising to make it through the bottleneck with good wholesome values intact. I'm raising her competent and co-operative.

If you're feeling down about working retail you should read this book. It's about the expected results of each degree of climate warming. It's 10 years old. The changes predicted here are actually mild compared to the changes we've seen, suggesting that we may be on track for a 4° warmer world (mass extinction, complete desertion of the mid-latitudes, the amazon first burning then drying to a desert, human fight toward the poles, endemic drought throughout asia, most crop-land blowing away as dust). Capitalism can't survive that!!

I can't give you numbers, although others have made such attempts. There is a book available called Six Degrees that attempts to describe the impacts of climate change over 100 years at different levels (1 degree C change; 2 degree C change; etc.). It has numbers, although I can't suggest how accurate they are (those kinds of numerical forecasting exercises are virtually impossible to do with accuracy in complex systems).

Another pop-science but seemingly sound exploration of likely effects (and current conditions) is Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Friedman. It definitely has a "position," but it is a good qualitative place to start if you want an entryway into global environmental change dynamics.

Please pick up and read:

http://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/1426203853

Or watch it. Goodness... they made it into film:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1224519/

The cool thing about this book is that the focus is on what we can tell happened at these temps at various points in the past. This doesn't give us a clear picture of the future. Indeed, the rate of change today is practically unprecedented. But this look into the past is rather illuminating.

4 degrees is BAD! As others have stated, it's not a simple thing of every part of the world just magically being 4 degrees warmer all the time. It won't be that uniform. There will be parts that get larger average temp increases than others.

There are simply far too many people who think they've stopped being Climate Change Deniers while remaining in incredible ignorance of the related facts. Getting more informed will address the confusion, if not necessarily the fear. I'm not trying to advocate anything here related to vegetarianism, tap water or whatever. It just will be more conducive overall the more people have a better grasp of the issues/data here.

If you have a chance, checkout the book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet takes an interesting look not only at what happens at four degrees, but also temperatures lower and higher. Essentially the book starts low and grows to the scenario of what would happen when we've reached six degrees by looking at evidence published in respectable journals such as Science and Nature

Here are a few links that I've found interesting or useful.

this one is an animation of the decline of arctic sea ice over the last couple decades:
Ice Dream by Andy Robinson

The Representative Concentration Pathways- possible future greenhouse gas concentrations depending on what emissions path humanity takes, adopted for the IPCC 5th assesment report in 2014.

How the global average temperature is expected to rise based on the chosen RCP's.
global temperature rise projections for different emissions scenarios

Here is what those temperature rises translate into in the real world-
a degree by degree explanation of what will happen when the earth warms a very short synopsis of some of the effects we may expect in the coming yeara as global average temperatures rise. More detail can be found in the book,
Six Degrees- Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas

Antarctic sea ice has also begun to collapse in the last few months:
global sea ice area

From Climate Code Red, an article that contends there is no "carbon budget" left to limit warming to 1.5C under sensible assumptions of risk and potential damage-
Unravelling the myth of a "carbon budget" for 1.5C

Kevin Anderson argues in this presentationthat limiting warming to below 2C consistent with global fairness requires immediate and deep cuts in emissions in the developed world consistent with a revolutionary energy transformation.

Australians for Coal a insightful look at their corporate climate policy update.

Watch this video clip, based on actual facts.

My top book recommendation:

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas

It paints a picture in a real nice way and serves as a good guide for thinking about various degrees.

As mentioned by /u/extinction6 watch Kevin Anderson.

Read a book like that a few years ago. Six Degrees. It's about global warming and its likely effects.

I am pretty sure op is talking about the book by Mark Lynas.

> The global temperature is increasing wildly

Define wildly. Since 1975 it's increased by an average of about .15 to .2 ^o C per decade and it's increased about 0.8^o C overall since 1880, with about 2/3 of that coming since 1975. It's probably increasing by a bit more than that now because global emissions keep increasing.

> in a few years many heavily populated areas will exceed "wet bulb" temperature, meaning they will become so hot that it would be impossible for human life to exist there

That doesn't seem to fit Wikipedia's definition of wet-bulb temperature, although I'll admit to being very unfamiliar with the term; do you know in what context McPherson used it?

It would help to know exactly what McPherson's temperature projections are. To me, the notion that the usual projections could render places currently supporting hundreds of millions of people uninhabitable within the next few years, or even decades, is tough to believe without hard numbers to back it up.

If you're curious for other sources, my impressions are based roughly on Six Degrees, by Mark Lynas and Introduction to Modern Climate Change, by Andrew Dessler. I think climate change is definitely capable of causing our extinction eventually, but it would require a lot of inaction on our part, and it would still take several centuries at least.

I haven't read it yet, but Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas is on my wish list.

> You seem to be forgetting the minor point of agriculture failing -- or is that no longer "your point"?

How is this not willfully obtuse, if not an outright misrepresentation?

I was the one suggesting that more northerly locations would be better situated to avoid temperatures driven to 45°C+, and you responded by pointing out that even Moscow "gets heatwaves" too.

I then demonstrated that Moscow has never experienced temperatures in the 40s. Ever.

A perfectly relevant refutation of your generalised exaggeration. That's all.

> water is going to vanish, everywhere?

Obviously not what I'm saying.

Some won't get enough, and some will get far too much. And some will even get just the right amount for some time - but at some point in a collapsing biosphere, not reliably enough in any one place to ensure sufficient crop survival and reliable harvesting to make agriculture viable.

No, I don't have a crystal ball, and can't tell you exactly where that point will be, but this extinction event is unfolding with unprecedented speed, and we are still accelerating it, so I really don't believe that ignoring uncomfortably pessimistic sources is a wise strategy.

> You're now blaming me for not engaging in threads I wasn't involved in?

Sorry, I was getting it confused with the other thread we're discussing similar matters in. I have to do all this on a crappy, broken smartphone since I don't use a computer, so no split-screen windows/advanced clipboard functionality/fancy keyboard for me.

It was referenced in this thread, not the other one.

> On the contrary, I've pointed out the "links" (really one link posted multiple times)

Since /u/Goochymayn posted the link to the projected effects here, I have posted a dozen different links that weren't this one in this thread.

> Man, you people are obsessed with this one website

Far from it, though a little stubborn in trying to encourage some sort of engagement with it on your part - it's sort of the opposite of cherry picking, to go on blithely claiming that it doesn't say what it does, and that the whole thing's just too silly to even acknowledge.

I read many websites, have read the book this summarises by Mark Lunas (FWIW, it won the 2008 Royal Society Book Prize and was turned into a National Geographic TV series, so it's not just some crappy little blog.)

And I agree it would be better if the summary had hyperlinked references. I don't post it here much/ever myself, precisely because of the lack of easy to follow hyperlinks to make it easier for people to check sources online. The book is better (books are always better than this internet rubbish.)

OK, you don't recognise it or any of its sources (though they've been bandied around here often enough,) - I will add some more links tomorrow when I've had some sleep, though it will be at the expense of speedily responding to your other posts (lots of busy-ness ATM.) I will come to them when time allows.

I accept that the descriptions of the effects at each temperature band may not be accurate. Which is why it would be interesting and useful to discuss what it actually predicts, and how much, if any merit there is to their arguments (it would be even better to discuss the book, but that's less feasible online in the temporary conversation cloud that is Reddit, given how few people have probably read it.)

It's less productive in the extreme, to only ever see it analysed by McPhersonite fanboys, too busy obsessing about the doom to look at it with a critical eye. But if they are accurate, then farming will self-evidently NOT be possible, because we will all be too extinct to practice it.

Other interesting topics exist of course, but they're pretty academic if we're looking anything like +7°C by the end of the century.

That too is an interesting topic in itself, and one I would like to see more people engaging in disputing, rather than just avoiding having to consider it at all on the one hand, or obsessively and unproductively doom-mongering about on the other.

They both seem like less productive (if understandably human) approaches.

I find it convincing enough to have committed to taking the measures I have anyway, though I try to keep an open mind.

> doesn't say what they claim it does. It literally doesn't say it.

It doesn't say exactly QUOTE farming will not be possible UNQUOTE, but FFS, it's predicting the sky effectively catching fire because of the methane content, superstorms at least as extreme as the ones that caused the Permian-Triassic extinction, with ""super-hurricanes” hitting the coasts [that] would have triggered flash floods that no living thing could have survived."

It says: "That episode was the worst ever endured by life on Earth, the closest the planet has come to ending up a dead and desolate rock in space.” On land, the only winners were fungi that flourished on dying trees and shrubs."

And you think agriculture will be possible in this?

It is true, this is at 5+°C, but they also state "Chance of avoiding five degrees of global warming: negligible if the rise reaches four degrees and releases trapped methane from the sea bed."

You've made no effort to refute any of this - you just refuse to engage with this source.

It explains the inexorable runaway temperature effect that will be (possibly has already been,) initiated, and so 4°/5°/6°/7°/+ is largely irrelevant - it's going up, up, up.

And the methane is already being released in observably huge quantities already at <1.5°C, so this does not look so unlikely that it's sensible to simply dismiss it to me, considering the fucktons of the stuff there is down there.

But hey, you've got potatoes and trees, so you'll be fine.

I (and probably other less optimistically- inclined folk here,) would be really interested in knowing why you, or other more optimistic folk, think this is not going to happen.

IF (and I freely admit that is not certain, but if) we're looking at anything like these projections coming to pass this century, then at some point this century, agriculture WILL fail.

And IF the runaway effect from all these tipping points we're burning through is real, then over some timespan, that's inevitable.

> A little emotional, aren’t we? The part where "the world" = "modern civilization"?

No. The part where everything bigger than a lystrosaur, including very probably humanity, is rendered extinct.

And actually I don't get emotional about it - I'm past that.

I get stubborn, and start building an Ark.

> The article they keep linking to doesn't say what they claim it does.

It claims unsurvivable, extinction-level conditions are coming, so yes - it does say what they claim (whether or not it's well-founded - that is a different argument. One you seem unwilling to engage in.)

> I've said that multiple times to them. They have no response for me. And neither will you, I expect. Read the goddamn article.

I have. And I can understand what it's saying. I'd like a reason to disbelieve it, but you're evidently unable to provide one.

I recommend reading the book (I ought to buy another one - lent it out, and never got it back.)