Our Final Warning

In 2008, Mark Lynas published Six Degrees, a book which charts the changes our planet will go through as, degree by degree, it warms over the coming decades. It imagined the likely future, of rivers ten times the size of the Amazon gushing off the ice sheet into the north Atlantic, vast pumping systems keeping the water out of most of Holland, devastation in the Nile delta, and Pakistan crippled by drought brought on by disappearing Himalayan glaciers. The scenarios imagined in Six Degrees might to some sound sensationalist, but on 27th August 2017, Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston…