Book Reviews
January-March 2008 (Vol. 9, No. 1)
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Alarming or Alarmist?
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
By Mark Lynas
Reviewed by Eric J. Steig
When Mark Lynas’s book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet came out in the U.K. last year, my initial reaction was that it was alarmist and probably not worth reading. A review in The Sunday Times (London) included a “red alert” list of catastrophic consequences of global warming accompanied by statements such as “forests ravaged by fire,” and “humans migrate in search of food.” (1) Such statements are at once frightening and vague (forests are ravaged by fire all the time) and go far beyond what science has to say about the matter. Even under the worst imaginable global warming scenarios, human activity will still depend more on human social behavior than on anything else.
Yet “alarmist” is a term that gets bandied about frequently in discussions of global warming, and it can be too carelessly applied. When I spoke with Lynas, he told me The Times had misconstrued what he had written in his book, and he assured me it was based entirely on the scientific literature. My colleague Stefan Rahmstorf agreed, saying in his review in Nature that the book is “alarming” but not “alarmist.” (2) The difference was very much on my mind as I sat down to write my own thoughts on the book.
Six Degrees, as the title suggests, consists of six main chapters. Each examines what the earth might look like as we raise the planet’s temperature by one, two, and more degrees Celsius. Laying out the book in this way makes for a logical progression of ideas—and a fair bit of suspense. Very few people, Lynas says, have got “the slightest idea what two, four, or six degrees of average warming actually means in reality,” and I’m sure he is right.
In chapter one at one degree Celsius, for example, Lynas describes a world with an annually ice-free Arctic Ocean. Yes, that’s quite plausible and supported by the literature—it’s perhaps even occurring a little sooner than expected. In the next chapter, as the two-degree-Celsius line is approached, Lynas warns that southern China can expect more flooding; the oceanic time lag means that it may take much longer for the rain-bearing summer monsoon to reach the drought-stricken north. That, too, is certainly plausible, based on the studies he cites. At four degrees Celsius, with global sea levels half a meter or more above current levels, “the Egyptian city of Alexandria’s long lifespan will draw to a close,” writes Lynas. “A substantial part of the city already lies below sea level, and by the latter part of this century a terminal inundation will have begun.” He continues predicting that a 50-centimenter rise in sea levels would displace 1.5 million people and cause US$35 billion of damage. Alarmist? Hardly. A 50-centimenter rise in sea level is well within the conservative IPCC projections, even for temperature increases of less than four degrees Celsius.
At five and six degrees Celsius, the book really does start to sound alarmist, with the analogy to Dante’s Inferno, used to good literary effect throughout the book, coming to the fore. At five degrees Celsius, Lynas paints a picture of “an entirely new planet . . . coming into being—one largely unrecognizable from the earth we know today.” At six degrees Celsius, he says, “the pump is primed . . . not for flourishing palm trees in Alaska, but for the worst of all earthly outcomes: mass extinction.”
“Aha!” say the critics. That’s alarmism. But is it? Lynas’s reference to the “entirely different planet” refers to the idea that at five degrees Celsius, the remaining ice sheets are eventually eliminated from both poles. That’s likely to be true. And unlike Al Gore’s discussion of sea level in An Inconvenient Truth, Lynas does emphasize the long timescales (thousands of years) in this case. Furthermore, published research raises the likelihood of a significant loss of ice sheets at lower temperatures, and Lynas could have claimed certainty of a disappearing Greenland ice sheet in an earlier chapter. That he doesn’t do so is characteristic of the book: it doesn’t tend to go beyond the published literature.
To be sure, Lynas does take a rather uncritical view of the scientific literature. For example, he highlights the purported evidence from a 2004 Nature paper of a slowdown in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation. (3) The follow-on study showing that the original data set was too small to say anything meaningful about ocean circulation trends was published after Lynas’s book was completed. (4) A deeper appreciation for statistics would have cautioned against highlighting those results in the first place. Does this constitute alarmism? I don’t think so. I think a layperson’s comprehensive reading of the published science—which I believe Six Degrees represents—paints a truly alarming picture of the future.
What Lynas’s book does do, however, is raise a different question. Is the future really so frightening, or does Six Degrees actually teach us as scientists that we are too provocative in the way we write our scientific papers? I don’t know the answer to this—in part because, like most busy professional scientists, I have no doubt read a smaller fraction of the literature than Lynas has. But I do think that all environmental scientists—including the conservation biologists who are likely to be reading this review—ought to read this book and ask themselves the same question. The answer is rather important. If it is we who are being alarmist, then perhaps we had better tone it down. On the other hand, if things are really so alarming, then perhaps we should be raising the alarm more vocally.
1. Girling, R. 2007. What will climate change do to our planet? The Sunday Times (London) 11 March 2007.
2. Rahmstorf, S. 2007. Degrees of change. Nature 448:136.
3. Bryden, H.L., H.R. Longworth, and S.A. Cuningham. 2005. Slowing of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation at 25° N. Nature 438:655-657.
4. Cunningham, S.A. et al. 2007. Temporal variability of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation at 26.5°N. Science 317:935–938.
The Great Naturalists
Edited by Robert Huxley
Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2007
This beautifully illustrated volume reads like a Lives of the Naturalists. Each short entry outlines the biography and scientific contributions of key natural historians, from ancient Greece to contemporary Europe. The book is a good entry into the evolution of natural history as well as a great reference for those who have already explored the roots of modern biology and geology. Highlights are the many reproductions of illustrations from the original literature, and these figures are more than just decoration. Many of the great naturalists were also illustrators, while others collaborated with artists. From Hooke’s and Leeuwenhoek’s use and popularization of microscopes to John James Audubon’s famous paintings of North American birds, science benefited immensely from their unique ways of looking at and depicting nature.
Book Review by Margaret Pizer, a conservation writer for The Nature Conservancy in Maine.
The Great Warming Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
By Brian Fagan
Bloomsbury Press, 2008
Brian Fagan’s latest effort is a refreshing take on an increasingly popular topic. The Great Warming chronicles Earth’s last great warm period, which affected a wide range of places between 800 and 1300 AD. Fagan describes the impact of this warming on a variety of civilizations while he looks for lessons about how the current warming trend may play itself out. His anthropologist’s-eye view of climate change reveals some winners—agriculture in Northern Europe and seagoing exploration in the far North Atlantic and South Pacific. But the losers’ stories are more ominous. From Mesoamerica to the Yellow River in China, some medieval civilizations suffered more from drought than from heat, and Fagan predicts the same may be true this time around.
Book Review by Margaret Pizer, a conservation writer for The Nature Conservancy in Maine.
Ivorybill Hunters The Search for Proof in a Flooded Wilderness
By Geoffrey E. Hill
Oxford University Press, 2007
Readers may be justified in asking whether the search for ivory-billed woodpeckers has already been the subject of too many books, but Geoff Hill’s contribution is more than just another description of the bird’s alleged comeback. Rather, it’s an honest and personal account of Hill’s little-known discovery, with colleagues from his Auburn University lab, of a population of ivorybills on the Choctawhatchee River in Florida. The Florida sightings have received less attention than those in Arkansas and may be news to those following the saga only casually. While outlining some compelling evidence that the birds are present in significant numbers on the Choctawhatchee, Hill strikes a good balance between excitement about the prospects for ivorybills and realism about the quality and conclusiveness of his data. He inspires the reader to hope for the future of ivorybills but simultaneously delivers an insider’s look at the ups and downs of searching for a possibly extinct species, peppered with insights about the nature of proof, the politics of science, and the differences between science and birding.
Book Review by Margaret Pizer, a conservation writer for The Nature Conservancy in Maine.
The Ends of the Earth
Edited by Elizabeth Kolbert and Francis Spufford
Granta Books, 2007
To commemorate the International Polar Year, Bloomsbury has released a collection of ice cap-inspired writings by the region’s explorers, essayists, and fictioneers. Start the book on one side for stories of the Arctic; turn it over and start from the other side for tales of the Antarctic. As introduced by Elizabeth Kolbert and Francis Spufford, some of the tales are so harrowing that readers might have to stop every so often and make sure they can still feel their toes.
The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World
By Steven Kazlowski
Braided River, 2008
Photographer Steven Kazlowski has spent the last eight years shadowing polar bears across Alaska and Canada. In The Last Polar Bear, he gathers more than 200 of his favorite shots, along with essays from several well-known scientists and writers. The book’s February release kicks off a 10-city traveling exhibition of Kazlowski’s work.
[...] came from Eric Steig, one of the contributing scientists to the Real Climate website, when he reviewed the book in Conservation Magazine. Initially he had assumed from news reports that the book was [...]