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The Fate of the World - Bill McGuire *****

The science behind climate change has been well covered, including in Bill McGuire's own Hothouse Earth, but I've not before seen a book that doesn't just use model predictions, but looks back at what we know about the state of the climate in different periods of the past, and what caused it, to help get a feel for the reality of the impact likely occur from various levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

McGuire starts with an exploration of solar variation - something that climate change deniers frequently bring up as an alternative explanation for global warming - pointing out that it definitely has an effect, but that's irrelevant to the clear and massive impact of our greenhouse gas emissions. He then takes us through various aspects of past climate variation, from ice ages to huge sea level rises, with a clear warning on the ease with which the climate can undergo relatively sudden changes when a tipping point is reached.

Along the way, McGuire is dismissive of attempts to mitigate climate change - while I agree that their impact is insufficient to allow us to carry on the way we are, it surely is still a good idea, for example, to go ahead with direct air capture, planting trees and so on. But fundamentally he emphasises our biggest hope is to cut back on fossil fuel use as fast as possible - and at the moment our governments simply don't make that easy enough. (A shame also he doesn't mention that biofuels are even worse than fossil fuels.)

I only have two small issues with the book. One's tiny, but irritating: McGuire refers to 'global heating' rather than 'global warming' - they both mean the same thing, and it feels like posturing to change the words, so it grates every time. It's also the case that there's rather too much detail on the historical events. At times I did skip read a few pages, because I didn't need all that detail on specific events and exactly what happened. The big picture is a brilliant idea that really captured my imagination, but it is possible to lose your audience with too much detail.

The front cover has a quote from Chris Packham that says 'Read it and weep, or read it and win.' Unfortunately, Chris seems not to have read the conclusion. I think a more realistic tag line would be 'Read it and despair, or read it and weep.' In the end, McGuire presents us with three possible outcomes from where we are now. That we don't cut back enough and enter a dire future where life is pretty much impossible to continue within a couple of hundred years, that we cut back fast enough that the impact will only be really bad, or that society collapses and as a result we cut back and things are only really bad. There is no 'win' here.

This is probably one of the most depressing books I've ever read - McGuire convinces me that things are going to be far worse for future generations than most of us imagine. I only hope that at least his portrayal will lead to the second option where we cut back sufficiently that things will only be really bad - but with experience of politics, I somehow doubt it. Even so, the best climate book I've read in ages.

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