Required reading for anyone under 30. This is the risk of our current path

Intensely sobering, even if you have been following the science for 33 years (as I have).

Depressing

But... This is why we have to fight. 3 degrees feels baked in at this point given global political apathy. This shows how big a disaster that will be for us and our successors.

This book was published in 2020, but because gathering material and writing and editing all take time, much of the research the author reports on is from around 2015 to 2019. And you know what? It's already largely out of date.

I'm not faulting the author, Mark Lynas. He couldn't help that. Almost no one could have predicted how rapidly the climate would continue breaking down in just the next few years. But anyway, it's a very good book, an honest and frightening account of how bad the situation already is and how much worse it's likely to become within our lifetimes.

In the end, we're not left without hope. But that hope is based upon the possibility of our industrial society taking unprecedented steps, making enormous and drastic changes between now and circa 2030. Will that happen? Well, even if we the people wanted to make a start, I'm afraid that our leaders, the owners of society, would never allow it... because it would cost them too much money. So there you go.

Scary but important read - very eye opening to what the future could become

Paints a horrifying picture of what may happen if we don't get our shit together and act properly on climate change.

We all need to read this, listen to this and take action from this. This is our Ghost of Christmas Future.

This is one of the most honest, upfront and no-nonsense-for-the-love-of-humanity-do-something books on climate change that I have read in many years working as an ecologist and many more years as an environmentalist. Lynas does not sugarcoat anything and does not shy aware from the problems, its causes and its certain and likely outcomes (yes climate change, or the more accurate climate breakdown, is real and it is happening now). He combines and compresses all of the scientific evidence, consensus (99% of all scientists people, 99%) and areas of uncertainty into one clear path to our own exctinction and how we can avoid it. It is clearly written, easy to follow (although depressing as we have had decades to avoid this point), and can be and should be read by just about anyone. Lynas does focus on the human tragedy of climate breakdown but he does cover the implications for wildlife and biodiversity in and of itself as well as the implications of this on us as a species. If this, coupled with the pioneering efforts of the younger generations to get us to take action, fails in us taking action then we really do only have ourselves to blame.

This book encapsulates the problem and the meta problem very well. It is a terrifying tale based on real science and that describes how impact of warming leads to unsustainable outcomes and liely human and planetary collapse of ecosystem and civilisation.

It goes by degrees where two degrees are apready morally unacceptable but the book covers values up to six which are uncharted.

The author accepts that Nuclear Power is the only potential energy that could be dense enough to enable life in the extreme six degree scenario, under some sort of domes
where a fraction of the world population grows its own food (the rest is wiped out a la mad-max).

But if any crtitical thinker wants to really progress on this issue read the last two chapters. We go from a moral extreme of decimating human population at six degrees to the self-stated religious position in the end chapter where
the author will simply not consider man made intervention on climate, period. And to further this accepts as morally just for people to make more children despite their near assured misery.

1. How can thw author ignore that geo-engineering could include anything from replanting to air sequestration or carbon capture, even before other more radical methods?
2. How can the author present a near inevitable catastrophe, then call to unspecified action, and encourage mote children to bring this battle forward? There is a contradiction in values here...
3. How can the author find it “acceptable” or at least ok to describe a planet of mad-max plus covered biospheres but does not imagine that state powers would jump his ethocal concerns on geo-engineering before that point?

Ultimately I guess the book is trying to drive political consensus toward reducing fossil fuel based dependence. But even in this dimension things are not very easy on the policy side. Overall there isn’t even consensus that a carbon tax would be socially fair.

Warming is a wicked problem, I wish we spent more time admitting how tricky rhis is. And examine all reasonable solutions.

For someone who loves post-apocalyptic/dystopian books, this was a great read. Unfortunately, this is not a fiction book. While the author speculates about the various degrees of global warning based on information currently available, this is a book about events that are inevitable if we don't start doing something about it. It sounds like a modern George Orwell, but it's not so far-fetched.