Six Degrees Could Change the World - A Global Wake Up Call

29 March 2009

Right after Earth Hour 2009 last night, I was fortunate to catch National Geographic's documentary, Six Degrees Could Change the World. It's a rude and graphic reminder that the world is an increasingly fragile place and that we need to take the warnings seriously. The docu itself is based on the book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas. Below is a fragment of the write up on Lynas' book and a video montage, both from the National Geographic website:

Six Degrees: The Book

Author Mark Lynas

In possibly the most graphic treatment of global warming yet published, noted science writer and 2006 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Mark Lynas explains in his latest book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, how Earth’s climate will be impacted with every degree of increase in temperature — and what we need to do about it, now, to avert disaster.

Scientists have established that the current episode of global warming of about 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last century has pushed Earth’s temperatures up to levels unprecedented in recent history. A 2007 report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that at no time in the past 1,300 years has our planet been as warm as it is now, while records from the deep sea suggest that temperatures are now within a degree of their highest levels in 1 million years.

I didn't get to see the whole documentary but I saw enough to realize that something more drastic needs to be done.