Our Final Warning

Six Degrees of Climate Emergency

By: Mark Lynas

Narrated by: Richard Burnip

This book 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.

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

©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)

Realistic perspective on climate warming

Cites dozens of papers and researchers as each degree of warming, its contributors and consequences are described in gory detail. excellent info and perspective. conclusion is a bit Gollum filled but whatever

Cuts to the heart of the crisis!

Our Final Warning is direct and to the point. Once finished I immediately started it again! It's that good.

Great Update if Important Book

I've been reading climate books for years but still learned a lot from this book. it fills in the picture of what degree temperature changes will do. This is one of the climate books no one should miss

Final Flaw

The author is an excellent researcher and reporter of the global catastrophe caused solely by Homo sapiens. With that said, he almost destroys his credibility with his absurd, humanistic conclusions that finish the book—first and foremost, his unequivocal permission for Homo sapiens to ignore the torturous, hellish future that overpopulation of Homo sapiens has directly caused, and grants permission for humans to breed away, and, thereby, sentence human offspring brought into the world now to (by his own reporting) a virtually unavoidable hellish world. He seems incapable of understanding, or chooses to completely deny, that more people equals even more and faster destruction of the planet. This is seemingly inexplicable and certainly inexcusable. I can only conclude that the author throws it in so that he isn’t categorized as what he seems to think is the worst state of being for humans right now—the doom sayer, even though that is the most informed, logical, and moral stance to presently take.

A Must-Read for Anyone Deeply Concerned about Climate Change

This is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it for anyone deeply concerned about climate change.

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.

mandatory reading

This book was so well written and so well read for us by the narrator.
It should be a must read for everyone.

Terrifying but everyone should read/listen

This book is desperately needed in our world! Everyone should read/listen to it. It’s a terrifying message but it’s more terrifying to imagine it going unheard, since we can still prevent the worst outcomes.

Very well written and informative.

The incredible amount of knowledge and research Fareed puts into his books is impressive. I thoroughly enjoyed this book from start to finish. I am looking forward to his next book.

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.