Climate

• Chapter two The Denial Industry (Monbiot, p27ff) gives details of hundreds of thousands of dollars given to individuals to skew the facts.

• All of the material in this book [Six Degrees] comes from the peer-reviewed scientific literature (pxxii)… I trawled through tens of thousands of scientific papers (Lynas, pxv-xvi).

• A third of all species would be committed to extinction by the time global temperatures reached two degrees (Lynas, p103).

• A three degree rise in global temperatures… effectively reverses the carbon cycle. Instead of absorbing CO2, vegetation and soils start releasing it in massive quantities, as soil bacteria work faster to break down organic matter in a hotter environment, and plant growth goes into reverse… carbon cycle positive feedbacks could tip the planet into a runaway global warming spiral… (p127-128)... Amazonia could turn into a desert (Lynas, p130-132)

• With five degrees of global warming, an entirely new planet is coming into being - one largely unrecognisable from the Earth we know today (Lynas, p207).

The Gulf Stream… allows the transfer of huge amounts of tropical warmth from the Gulf of Mexico to northern Europe, making that region superbly hospitable to human settlement. Without the Gulf Stream, Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia would have a climate like Labrador’s, colder by twenty degrees Fahrenheit in annual mean (Kunstler, p153). Did you know that the exhalations of breath and other gaseous emissions by the nearly seven billion people on earth, their pets and their livestock are responsible for 23 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions? If you add on the fossil fuel burnt in the total activity of growing, gathering, selling and serving food, all of this adds up to about half of all carbon dioxide emissions... I do not see how a sixty percent reduction can be achieved without great loss of life (Lovelock, 2009, p47).