Reddit reviews Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

When I say I "doubt" humans survive I was sort of being tongue-in-cheek. There is absolutely no chance we’d survive that. There’s a popular book based on scientific modeling that lays out the devastation of only 6 degrees, and burning all known reserves would almost double that. Basically we have a “carbon budget” to stay within the 2 degrees that is generally seen as the upper limit of “safe”, and globally there is 5 times the amount of fossil fuels needed to hit that, plus you have massive carbon/methane deposits in the earth that would release. There would be no adapting.

Some good starting places:

• climate.nasa.gov Planet vital signs
  
• any Kevin Anderson lecture
  
• Vaclav Smil's "Energy Revolution? More Like a Crawl"
  
• Guy McPherson's big essay (I don't agree with it, but if you want to be up on the conversation, you should know it.)
  
• Trillionth Tonne countdown
  
• Climate Explorer(US only?) -- see how it will impact you locally
  
• Faster Than Expected blog
  
• Desdemona Despair
  
• Six Degrees by Mark Lynas (He compiled a bunch of scientific research and then basically sorted it by the degree it is predicted for -- a kind of roadmap of climate destruction.)

Ah, sorry I misread. So, I'd say that's a drastic underestimate of the cost of doing nothing. See for example the paper linked by ILikeNeurons:

> combining realistic assumptions...increases the present social cost of carbon in the model nearly eightfold from US$15 per tCO2 to US$116 per tCO2. Furthermore, passing some tipping points increases the likelihood of other tipping points occurring to such an extent that it abruptly increases the social cost of carbon.

For a great overview of what it looks like, see the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree, with extensive references. Two degrees is grim, three is disastrous, and at four the survival of modern civilization starts to look shaky. Six doesn't look survivable at all.

Trouble is, somewhere around two degrees people think feedback effects will seriously kick in, and the planet will go several degrees further with no more help from us. The reason people think that is that geologists can see that it's happened before; small temperature increases caused by orbital variations have kicked off much larger warming cycles.

Required reading for you and others like you, OP

https://www.amazon.com/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet-ebook/dp/B002RI9F0E