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Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide

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The book succeeds for me on its lasting psychological feelings about teeming life forms and its atmospherics of horror and wonder over the precariousness of the life of an individual and our species. After recent reads of science books on the current human caused threats to biological diversity of the planet, it was fascinating for me to experience a scenario where excessive diversity among plants puts us almost out of the picture. Sound almost ridiculous. But who is to know that far into the future... I would have thought nothing would have survived the radiation and anything living would have to be underground or deep in the sea. But I digress. And we should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. A rise of 2C and above will seriously threaten the stability of global society, McGuire argues. It should also be noted that according to the most hopeful estimates of emission cut pledges made at Cop26, the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C.

Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide - Softcover - AbeBooks Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide - Softcover - AbeBooks

The future is forbidding from this perspective, though McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilisation. Renewable energy growth vs. fossil fuel growth: “The power of Fossil Fuels” Rune Likvern, with data from British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy 2018, FractionalFlow.com; and Biophysical Economics Policy Centre; “Fossil fuel expansion crushes renewables,” Barry Saxifrage, with data from J. David Hughes, September 2017, National Observer. Alas, we did not dare to have any hopes you would share your food with us, for your food is sacred and you wish to see us starve. You are very clever to hide from us the jumpvil food we know you always carry. We are glad great herder, that you make us starve if our dying makes you have a laugh and a gay song and another sandwich game. Because we are humble, we do not need food to die with..." YEP.By 2070, about 20% of the land surface could be uninhabitable due to extremes of heat, weather, drought and disease. After a while I noticed that I was only really reading from sentence to sentence and not paying much attention to the paragraphs or chapters as a whole. As a result this review was nearly just a list of quotes without any context and in fact that's how I'm going to end it anyway. These are some quotes that I thought were standout lines from the text: Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity began pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures have risen by just over 1C. At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030. Earth has not experienced such a hothouse state — characterized by the absence of continental glaciers and sea-level over 100-meters higher — since the Cretaceous period, 100-million years ago. At that time, atmospheric CO 2 had reached 2000 parts-per-million (ppm) and average temperatures had reached 11°C warmer than the 20th century average. We’re now at about 410 ppm CO 2, and 1°C warmer than the 20th century average. Meanwhile, in spite of good intentions, we have not slowed our carbon emissions. There are probably more references to biblical times and/or to Alexander Pope as Gren and his companions struggle to survive in the hothouse:

hothouse, but one day 40C The terrifying truth: Britain’s a hothouse, but one day 40C

The worldbuilding is stupendous; the images are so vivid and well drawn, that one cannot but be amazed by it. And in this green world live the degenerate humans, green and small, reduced to primary instincts and trying to survive among all these enormous and great dangers. Yes, weirder than giant plant-spiders climbing enormous beanstalks to journey between the Earth and Moon.) Among the records broken during the book’s editing was the announcement that a temperature of 40.3C was reached in east England on 19 July, the highest ever recorded in the UK. (The country’s previous hottest temperature, 38.7C, was in Cambridge in 2019.)

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The plot itself is mostly an excuse to travel the planet and observe and comment on the strange new world the Earth has become. The main character, Gren, is part of a human tribe that decides to seek a better, safer place to live far from their current home. While plants have grown bigger, stronger, smarter and more aggressive, humans are now only one-fifth of their original size and live on the edge of extinction.

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