Green Group discussion

Anyone read Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas (who wrote Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.)

I got the impression that Our Final Warning is like an updated Six Degrees by now 13 years old.

Has anyone read it?

I have not. One thing I find is people are always looking for hope, and I don't have much to give them. Even with a concerted effort, we are in big trouble.

I'm just now on the sixth degree chapter of Our Final Warning. It is indeed an updated version of the original Six Degrees. In contrast to the lies of deniers - who falsely claim that scientists are "alarmist" - Lynas documents numerous examples of climate harm that are turning out to be worse than the earlier predictions.

I recommend the book to everyone, particularly to anyone who is contemplating procreation. Everyone should be aware of the man-made hell they are throwing any children they create into.

Hope isn't really the issue. Virtue is. Most people view themselves as basically good people, and they want to be treated as such. No matter how much fossil fuel they burn. Lynas largely sidesteps the issue of individual responsibility for climate change, although he doesn't ignore it completely (because that isn't really possible). But as climate change turns out to be as bad as the scientists have been telling us, or often even worse, it's time that we update our notion of what a "good" person is. That would be a person who, among other things, minimizes their personal contribution to climate destruction as far as possible.

By analogy, a "good" person back when slavery was legal was a person who, among other things, chose not to own slaves. Whether or not their personal choice had any effect on the overall number of slaves. Lynas doesn't get to grips with this issue at all in the book. He's still operating on the assumption that climate change mitigation is exclusively the job of governments, never mind the obvious fact that any government that would take real action on the climate would immediately be voted out in the next election, or overthrown sooner in a popular uprising. Just look at how the US President is judged in an inverse relationship to the price of gasoline. The overwhelming majority of Americans want to cook the planet, and they want to do it as cheaply to themselves as possible.

Daniel, thanks for reading this book and commenting. I read the original. Scary. Thank you for (by inference) calling me a good person.


Back in the days of slavery, to further your analogy, people who didn't own slaves would have had to also refuse to wear cotton or fabric dyed with indigo, smoke tobacco, eat sugar and drink rum, etc. in order to extend their personal influence. And the shipping trade was so heavily funded by the products of slave labour that the person would have had to refuse to buy anything that had been on a ship. People had few choices in those days, but we can see that today the principle is the same; if buying or using something has contributed to climate change, reduce our use.

Side point, Daniel: when you say "Everyone should be aware of the man-made hell they are throwing any children they create into."
Please consider replacing man-made with human-caused, human-made, artificial, made, built, constructed etc. Women do much of the shopping, working and procreating and some women are working hard to document and fight climate change.