Our Final Warning

Six Degrees of Climate Emergency

By: Mark Lynas

Narrated by: Richard Burnip

Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's Summary

This audiobook must not be ignored. It really is our final warning.

Mark Lynas delivers a vital account of the future of our earth and our civilisation, if current rates of global warming persist. And it’s only looking worse.

We are living in a climate emergency. But how much worse could it get? Will civilisation collapse? Are we already past the point of no return? What kind of future can our children expect? Rigorously cataloguing the very latest climate science, Mark Lynas explores the course we have set for Earth over the next century and beyond. Degree by terrifying degree, he charts the likely consequences of global heating and the ensuing climate catastrophe.  

At one degree - the world we are already living in - vast wildfires scorch California and Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the Arctic ice cap melts away and coral reefs disappear from the tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food, threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are too hot for human habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate refugees. At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the threat of the end of all life on Earth. 

These escalating consequences can still be avoided, but time is running out. We must largely stop burning fossil fuels within a decade if we are to save the coral reefs and the Arctic. If we fail, then we risk crossing tipping points that could push global climate chaos out of humanity’s control.

©2020 Mark Lynas (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic Reviews

"Mark Lynas...has time-travelled into our terrifying collective future.... Go with him on this breathtaking, beautifully told journey...I promise that you will come back...determined to alter the course of history." (Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything)

"Scientists predict that global temperatures will rise by between one and six degrees over the course of this century and Mark Lynas paints a chilling, degree-by-degree picture of the devastation likely to ensue unless we act now...a rousing and vivid plea to choose a different future." (Daily Mail)  

"Buy this book for everyone you know: if it makes them join the fight to stop the seemingly inexorable six degrees of warming and mass death, it might just save their lives." (New Statesman)

One of the best

Mark Lynas is a British author who is best known for his *Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet* published in 2007. This is an update 13 years later and it is even more pessimistic given what has happened with no reduction in CO2 emissions. Both books follow a simple, clear and calm format. Chapter 1 is a description of the world at 1 degrees. And so on up to Chapter 6. It is based on the best science available, sourced to academic journals such as Nature and the IPCC. Assuming CO2 levels continue to climb steadily, it's likely we will reach 3 degrees by mid to late century. This is game over because natural tipping points take over and society ceases to function due to widespread drought and killer heat as it reaches 4-6 degrees. It's also possible 2 degrees will cause this, there is no safe level from here out. Greenland has already crossed the tipping point, it will now melt completely no matter what we do. Almost every extinction in history has been caused by global warming, we live on a perilously balanced planet. There is no historic parallel for the rate and amount of CO2 emissions, it exceeds the worst extinction the Siberian Traps by a factor of 60 in terms of speed of emissions. And while there have been periods when the total ppm exceed our own, things are different now - the sun is brighter causing more warming per molecule then in the past, and again no historic precedent for speed and volume of emissions. Lynas ends this hopeless book with a tone of hope: do not give up. Immediately stop all fossil fuel usage no matter the cost. If enough people take this approach we will see dramatic changes and perhaps in time because there isn't much left. I'm rating this highly not because of the message, there are already many excellent global warming books. This one stands out by focusing on the big picture without going too far into the weeds and becoming disaster "porn" which can leave you exhausted and demoralized. This is a large complex topic and there is a lot to know this gets all the main pieces correct.

Fantastic listen - Story and Narration

One of the few books that I have re-listened to over again. Wish he does another update once the world hits 2 degrees.

Final, or final final, or realio trulio final?

This is a good book, perhaps a necessary book, but also in a way too much. It is climate disruption porn. The reader is simply hit with an avalanche of disaster, which in fact is precisely what humans will be hit with if giant steps are not taken soon. The problem, as I see it, with books like this (and similar books like Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth), is that like porn, or addictions, the effect becomes less with each hit, unless the dose is ratcheted up. How many times can the literate public be told the end is nigh (and yet, like most such warnings, the end does not arrive on time) until the warnings begin to feel like crying wolf? This is true even if, as I believe in this case, the warnings are, more or less, true. But if the end is nigh, why is it that environmentalists in large part refuse to accept one solution we have in terms of energy production, which is nuclear power? Now, nuclear power comes with dire problems of its own; but if humanity (and other life forms) faces an existential crisis, should we not throw everything we have at it? Skeptics rightly see that environmentalists by and large have not taken that step, and that the environmentalists continued (until the coronavirus) to fly to conferences where they decried the emission of carbon. And many environmentalists tie the fight against climate change to the fight for social justice, thereby ensuring a blame game in which the US will blame China, China will blame the US, and the countries formerly assumed to be “developing” will try to claim they had nothing to do with the problem and are merely victims. The question inevitably arises, If environmentalists don’t seem to care desperately about climate disruption, why should I? If this book is really Our Final Warning, what happens when not much has been done five years from now? My take is that the problem is so bad that authors should not claim that their warning is final until it really is clearly true, and until most environmentalists start acting like it really is clearly true.

Scintillating, Searing and Serious Science

Required reading for every teenager, adult and especially politician. Mark holds out hope, but in his seemingly impeccably researched Final Warning, I fear he highlights how humanity will fail to fully address the coming catastrophe of climate change.

Nicely set out

A lot of good information and the degree per chapter works well. Lots of up to date stuff as IPCC does lag behind because of the nature of that process.