The planet is facing fierce heat waves, record temperatures and sweeping wildfires. Since the early days of this summer, historic temperature records have been broken in Europe, the US and China, where dozens of cities have been declared on red alert.
And this is just the beginning, says Bill McGuire, professor of geophysics and climate risk at University College London. His new book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. It was released in bookshops just this week and is expected to be read carefully by many citizens who, after being hit by record-breaking temperatures in the UK in recent days, now face a wave of drought that will further intensify their suffering.
The professor notes that - for too long - we have ignored warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously warming the Earth and now we will pay the price for our complacency with extreme storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves.
The crucial point, he says, is that there is no longer any chance of avoiding a sweeping climate collapse. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which deadly heat waves and temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius will be frequent in the tropics, summers in temperate latitudes will be hot, and oceans will become hot and acidic. "A child born in 2020 will face a much more hostile world than their grandparents," McGuire points out.
The volcanologist, who also served as a member of the Natural Hazards Task Force for the UK government, expresses an extreme position. On the other hand, most climate experts still argue that we still have time, though not much, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Zero emissions through rapid action and addressing global warming are still within our grasp, they note.
"Climate appeasement"
McGuire does not agree with these claims. "I know a lot of people who work in climate science who say one thing in public and [ANOTHER] very different thing in private. Certainly, they're all much more afraid of the future that awaits us, but they don't openly admit it. I call this "climate appeasement" and I think it just makes things worse. People need to know how bad things are going to get before we can begin to hope that we can deal with the crisis," he says."
McGuire completed his book Hothouse Earth in late 2021. In it, he included many of the record-high temperatures that had plagued the planet. A few months later, and while sales were booming, he found that many of those records had already been shattered. "That's the problem with writing a book about climate collapse," McGuire says. "By the time it's published it's already becoming unpublished. That's how fast things are moving."
Among the records broken before the book was published was the announcement that the temperature in anatal England reached 40.3 degrees Celsius on 19 July, the highest ever recorded in the UK.
In addition, London's fire service had to deal with fires across the capital, with one of them destroying 16 homes in Wennington, east London. Firefighters in the area had to battle to save the fire station building itself.
"Who would have thought that a village on the edge of London would be almost wiped out by fires in 2022," says McGuire. "If a country needs a wake-up call, that's certainly what this is about."
Meanwhile, fires of unprecedented intensity and severity have hit parts of Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in the US has led to catastrophic flooding.
"And as we move towards the end of 2022, the world out there is already different," he adds. "Soon, it will be unrecognisable to all of us."
Source.gr, with information from Guardian
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