#mark lynas

Silent summer - a never-ending heat wave, devoid of birdsong, insect hum, and all the weird and wonderful living noises that subconsciously keep us company.

-- Mark Lynas

Excerpt from review of the book, “Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency” from Yale Climate Connections:

The motto for 21st-century climate science might be, “That happened faster than I expected.” Antarctic researcher Christina Hulbe suggested this to some colleagues a few years ago, and indeed the dwindling of the Arctic Ocean ice pack and the forces promoting disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet and Antarctic ice shelves have come decades earlier than expected. But other features of climate change are also showing up sooner than many climate scientists expected.

There’s a stunning example in British author Mark Lynas’s essential new book, Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (HarperCollins-Fourth Estate, 2020). It’s an update of his 2007 book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, also a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of our civilization and our planet. Both books give us a ladder of chapters, each reporting findings for what scientists expect to happen at a given level of global warming. Lynas starts with one degree above pre-industrial temperatures, a level not reached in 2007 but passed in 2016. He continues through two, three … up to six degrees, a planet so catastrophically different from the present that science can barely imagine it.

In his 2007 chapter on three degrees of warming, Lynas wrote about monster storms. A fine writer, he brought the science alive with a vivid description of an imaginary 2045 hurricane dumping enormous amounts of rain on – well, a random American city, he picked Houston. In his present book, he repeats the description, now moved up to the one-degree chapter, to remind us of what already happened in 2017 when hurricane Harvey devastated Houston.

https://www.axios.com/co2-goals-energy-production-3885412f-a7cf-429c-b37d-44a7a1de46e5.html

I’m currently reading Mark Lynas- Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.

All this stuff continues to leave me dumbfounded.  I get into it, read about the realities and start to gauge the gravity.  Then I’ll snap out of it for a short period back into the ‘regular world’ that people inhabit who think everything is fine.  Then I start back on it again.  It’s like I can’t really function if I fully comprehend what’s going on.  And that’s how I’m dealing with it while actively trying to learn and understand the material.  How are people going to learn about this when they don’t want to know, or when it’s in their interests not to know?  Meanwhile globally influential individuals and institutions who actually have the power to do something about it- are doing the opposite of what needs to be done.  MAD- mutually assured destruction.

I’ll know a lot more when I’ve finished Mark’s book but the simple way of putting it all at this point is that- life on Planet Earth as we know it is absolutely doomed.  It’s all getting worse and there is no prevention, only harm mitigation, with seemingly no global interest other than complete annihilation.

Presenting Six Degrees by Mark Lynas. Reviewed by The Lone Reader podcast from the Everett Public Library in Everett, Washington.

By Mark Lynas

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Golden Rice, marking the third positive international assessment for the genetically engineered biofortified crop.

Previously, Food Standards Australia, New Zealand and Health Canada gave Golden Rice the stamp of approval in February and March 2018 respectively.

In an official letter to the developers of Golden Rice,…

By Mark Lynas APRIL 24, 2015

NAIROBI, Kenya — Mohammed Rahman doesn’t know it yet, but his small farm in central Bangladesh is globally significant. Mr. Rahman, a smallholder farmer in Krishnapur, about 60 miles northwest of the capital, Dhaka, grows eggplant on his meager acre of waterlogged land.

As we squatted in the muddy field, examining the lush green foliage and shiny purple fruits, he…