Possibly the most depressing, eye opening book I’ve ever read and it’s all happening right now. This book was published just 2 short years ago. If you wanted an idea of the tone of this book, the first line in this book is “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”. It’s also not just the authors general feeling or negativity, he has put a lot of research into it which you can tell with the bibliography being over 60 pages.
What’s so scary is not that global warming is happening but the pace at which it is speeding up. I said Wow out loud on the second page after reading the passage “more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.
A lot of the numbers of people affected are so large they’re almost incomprehensible. But some of the predictions are startling. Things like every beach you’ve ever visited will be underwater by the end of the century, along with the entire nation of the Maldives and the Kennedy space centre. The ocean’s will eventually rise 260 feet (80 metres). More than 600 million people love within 30 feet of sea level today.
He has an update in the last pages which he added since originally writing the book in 2018. As he points out by the time anyone reads the book it will already be a different world to the one the book was written in. As time passes that will become more apparent. An example of how apparent this is becoming is in some of the last paragraphs about how the wild fires in California are exponentially growing. In 2013 it burned 602,000 acres. In 2017 it was 1.2 million acres. In 2018, 1.89 million. I then googled the previous year (2020) to when I read the book. Its was a truly terrifying 4.5 million acres. Burned. In a single year.
This was the case every single time I Googled a statistic referred to in the book. Even though it was only 3 years ago, I always found there was a substantial increase in whatever was being measured whether that be PPM of carbon in the atmosphere or global average temperatures.
This book fills me with a defeatist attitude. I was shocked to see the final sentence surmise that the author thinks we can solve climate change. I really hope he’s right but I’m sure that whatever happens in terms of the climate, the world is going to look completely different and unrecognisable to the children of today as they reach old age.
Favorite quotes from the book:
The burden of responsibility is too great to be shouldered by a few, however comforting it is to think all that is needed is for a few villains to fall. – page 30
We all lived for money, and that is what we died for. – page 55
…Extended nuclear war that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will unleash. – page 60
Nearly two thirds of major cities are on the coast. – page 62
Seventy one percent of the planet is covered in water. Barely more than 2 percent of that water is fresh, only 0.007 percent of the planets water is available to fuel and feed its seven billion people. – page 86
As many as 2.1 billion people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water. – page 87
If climate change is a shark, the water resources are the teeth. – page 93
More than a fourth of the carbon emitted by humans is sucked up by the oceans. – page 95
With Co2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent. – page 100
Already more than 10,000 people die from air pollution daily. – page 101
The Indian capital is home to 26 million people. In 2017, simply breathing its air was the equivalent of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day. – page 103
the planets infrastructure was simply not built for climate change, which means the vulnerabilities are everywhere you look. – page 120
A planet four degrees warmer would have perhaps twice as many wars as we do today. And likely more. – page 125
air pollution levels positively predicted incidents of every single crime category they looked at – from car theft and burglary and larceny up to adult, rape, and murder. – page 129
Between a quarter and a half of all those exposed to extreme weather events will experience them as ongoing negative shock to their mental health. – page 136
Rising temperature and humidity are married, in the data, to emergency-room visits for mental health issues. – page 137
Each increase of a single degree Celsius in monthly temperature is associated with almost a percentage point rise of the suicide rate in the United states, and more than two percentage points in Mexico. – page 138
The richest 10 percent producing half of all emissions. – page 148
Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild. – page 154
More than 10,000 people die each day, globally, from the small-particulate pollution produced by burning carbon. – page 183
If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U average, the total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. – page 187
Overall: 92%