Floods are becoming wetter, droughts drier and hurricanes fiercer. Such calamities mark “the end of normal”
Tim Duggan Books; 320 pages; $27. Allen Lane; £20.is a devilish problem for humanity: at once urgent and slow-moving, immediate and distant, real and abstract. It is a conundrum for writers, too. Relegating it to a human-interest story—a Bangladeshi displaced by rising sea levels, say—downplays its civilisation-wide significance; sticking to scary forecasts—200m climate refugees by 2050, thewarns—diminishes its visceral relevance.
Things will get much worse. The world is on course to become at least 3°C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Within a few decades, this could mean that temperatures in Mecca render thephysically impossible for many of the 2m Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year. With a rise of 7°C— plausible if humanity remains wedded to fossil fuels—swathes of Earth’s equatorial band would become uninhabitable.
He has a point when he says that exercising caution over warning signs is tantamount to complacency. Occasionally, however, he could exercise a bit more of it himself. For example, he acknowledges that humans are an adaptive species, then cites projections of lives lost to heatwaves, air pollution and the like, which typically do not factor in adaptation measures.
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