Our Final Warning

As one can tell from the title, this is not a book for the faint-hearted. But it is a masterful and nuanced synthesis of climate and earth system science that details what is likely to happen if the climate crisis continues unabated.

I loved the way it shows us in a systematic, step-by-step fashion how each additional degree of planetary heating will disrupt our world and steadily push us towards the brink. And it does so in a way that is sensitive to geographical variation and uneven vulnerabilities between the global north and south. This is an essential guide to… show more.

This book makes the stakes of climate change real.

Lynas paints vivid, reasonably science-based pictures of what the world would look like at 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 degrees C hotter (we’re at 1.4 today). The biggest reason I like this book is how forcefully it exposes the lazy thinking of the “over the cliff, all is lost, curl up and die” variety. In fact, hotter is worse, hotter by more is worse by more, and it keeps going.

So even if our efforts are working to keep it below 2.5, below 3, below 3.5, or worse (versus the… show more.