The six degrees of the title refer to the terrifying possibility that average temperatures will rise by up to six degrees within the next hundred years. But the biggest story of all comes from South America, where a conflagration of truly epic proportions has begun to consume the Amazon…Īlien as it all sounds, Mark Lynas’s incredible new book is not science-fiction nor is it sensationalist. The Pakistani president authorises the use of nuclear weapons in the case of an Indian military counter-strike. Its desperate government prepares a last-ditch attempt to increase the flow of the Indus river by bombing half-constructed Indian dams in Kashmir. Pakistan, crippled by drought brought on by disappearing Himalayan glaciers, sees 27 million farmers flee to refugee camps in neighbouring India. Meanwhile, in New York, a Category 5-plus superstorm pushes through the narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn, devastating waterside areas from Long Island to Manhattan. Vast pumping systems keep the water out of most of Holland, but the residents of Bangladesh and the Nile Delta enjoy no such protection. Displaced victims of North Africa’s drought establish a new colony on Greenland’s southern tip, one of the few inhabitable areas not already crowded with environmental refugees. On the edge of Greenland, rivers ten times the size of the Amazon are gushing off the ice sheet into the north Atlantic. Picture yourself a few decades from now, in a world in which average temperatures are three degrees higher than they are now. An eye-opening and vital account of the future of our earth and our civilisation if current rates of global warming persist, by the highly acclaimed author of ‘High Tide’.

Six degrees by mark lynas