Introduction

In 2007 Mark Lynas published Six Degrees Our Future on a Hotter Planet, which walked through the potential implications of climate warming year degree by degree. In 2020 he published an updated version of the book: Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.

The books can contribute significantly to our thinking about climate risk, which is ultimately more of a function of uncertainties about the future than certainties. But books like this suffer from a fundamental problem. By the time you’re finished you’ll have forgotten more than 50% of its content, and you’re likely to forget the rest over the next couple of weeks. That makes it a lot harder to take ongoing advantage of the massive amount of research that Mark Lynas did in assembling the books.

That’s why the Climate Web exists. Not just to help you leverage the knowledge in Mark Lynas’ books, of course, but to manage the knowledge associated with hundreds of books and reports, and thousands of articles and websites.

With respect to Mark Lynas latest book, the screenshot below illustrates how we’ve extracted factoids, arguments, dates, degree-by-degree climate impacts etc. from the book (different categories of extracted materials are color- and icon-coded so you always know what you’re looking at - but we won’t get into the details of that here) for purposes of integrating the information into the Climate Web.

But for the purposes of this Ebook, we’ve made a lot of the information in the book very easy for you to scan through. We hope it will encourage you to dig deeper into the book (it’s heavily referenced with respect to the information presented, and the topic of climate risk more generally.

The Climatographers