Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is a fast-moving, scary and explicit scenario of what may happen to Earth and us with each degree of global warming. A must-read for everyone who has any doubts about what’s at stake.
Your fifth book is Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas.
First of all, I would like to say that the Optimum Population Trust has been making dire predictions like the ones in this book for quite some time. And my fellow policy director David Nicholson-Lord has written some excellent things on environmental population threats. But this book by Mark Lynas is a must-read, I think, for anyone who has any doubts about what is at stake. It’s a very fast-moving explicit scenario about what might happen on earth to all of us, with each degree of global warming temperature rise. And it’s based on a lot of scientific research.
For example he has looked at each of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios. The latest one projected, I believe, a rise of up to six degrees in the next hundred years. And we are already at nearly one degree over pre-industrial levels.
Mark Lynas takes us very eloquently, as Virgil did descending through the Dante’s circles of hell, through what might happen at each degree of warming. A rise of two degrees is the point of no return; the tipping point at which nothing can be done to reverse the warming. And very frighteningly Lynas concludes (as do many others) that we have in fact got just seven years to stop emissions raising temperatures to this two degree threshold.
Seven years from now?
Seven years from now – yes.
But looking back to one of your books, Limits of Growth, do you think that there’s a possibility that these are dire predictions that might not come to anything?
Of course there is always doubt. Let’s hope everybody’s wrong [laughs]. But I think we should act under the precautionary principle that everyone now agrees with, that action must be taken very fast.
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Rosamund McDougall is a policy director for the Optimum Population Trust, a think-tank established in 1991 to examine the impact of human population on its environment. She has been campaigning on population issues since the 1970s. She spent time in Borneo: ‘The jungle was teaming, throbbing with life, ranging from the most glorious birds to orang-utans. The word orang-utan is actually Malay for man of the forest. So it brings you close to the idea that humans are animals living in this environment. But sadly a lot of the area has been destroyed because of logging and the rainforest is threatened.’ If we don’t reduce our impact on the environment by population control the results will be catastrophic, she says.
