{"id":7691,"date":"2023-08-12T07:58:48","date_gmt":"2023-08-12T12:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/?p=7691"},"modified":"2023-08-12T07:58:48","modified_gmt":"2023-08-12T12:58:48","slug":"book-review-hothouse-earth-an-inhabitants-guide-by-bill-mcguire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/2023\/08\/12\/book-review-hothouse-earth-an-inhabitants-guide-by-bill-mcguire\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Hothouse Earth, an Inhabitants Guide by Bill McGuire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’m certain that it won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with this blog that I’m very much concerned with Climate Change \/ Global Warming and in fact with environmental issues in general. I know that more and more of my posts lately have been devoted to the damage that we ourselves are doing to our planet. I guess I’m just trying to do what I can to educate people about how bad the climate crisis is, and how much worse it could get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The latest climate crisis I never imagined happening are the wildfires raging across the Hawaiian islands. Maui in particular has been devastated. (Credit: BBC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So in this post I’m going to review a book by an author who is much better suited to give the warning about climate change than I am. Bill McGuire is Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London and was a contributing scientist to the 2012 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Since that time Professor McGuire has written numerous articles for periodicals about the coming dangers of global warming as well as the book I’ll be reviewing today, ‘Hothouse Earth, an Inhabitants Guide’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cover art for ‘Hothouse Earth’ by Bill McGuire<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Professor Bill McGuire is one of the World’s leading climatologists and the author of several books on the coming climate crisis. (Credit: UCL) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Professor McGuire begins at the beginning, two hundred and fifty years ago with the invention by Richard Arkwright of a mechanical loom for the production of cotton thread, an invention that is often sited as the beginning of the industrial revolution. While that first mechanical loom was powered by a water wheel subsequent versions were soon powered by James Watt’s coal burning steam engine and so began the connection between industry and carbon emissions. In ‘Hothouse Earth’ Professor McGuire often returns to the day of Richard Arkwright as being his baseline for the days before humanity began dumping huge amounts of CO2<\/sub> into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Often called the father of the Industrial Revolution Richard Arkwright invented the water driven loom shown here. (Credit: Study.com)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

‘Hothouse Earth’ then presents a brief outline of those scientists who studied the effect that CO2<\/sub> in the atmosphere has on the planet’s temperature. It was the American chemist Eunice Foote who in 1856 demonstrated that CO2<\/sub> is a greenhouse gas, trapping the Sun’s energy so that it warms our planet. Then just forty years later it was Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius who developed the first climate models for how Earth’s temperature would change depending on the amount of CO2<\/sub> in the atmosphere. Based on the amount of coal that was being burned back in 1900 Arrhenius even predicted that we would be seeing the effects of global warming just about now! As Professor McGuire puts it “No one can say we weren’t warned!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Besides predicting global warming over 125 years ago Svante Arrhenius was also executor of Alfred Nobel’s will and therefore the person who actually set up the Nobel prizes, winning a chemistry one himself in 1903. (Credit: Energy Education)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

With his background in geology Professor McGuire is well versed in how the Earth’s temperature has changed in the past, from ice ages to long periods when the planet was so warm that the polar ice caps completed melted. Throughout ‘Hothouse Earth’ Professor McGuire uses examples from those past eras to illustrate what our climate will be like before long, while repeatedly pointing out that the climate of our planet today is changing faster than it ever has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Geologically planet Earth is actually in an ice age period. The fact that it is burning up is completely our doing! (Credit: www.history.com)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The meat of ‘Hothouse Earth’ is a long survey of the ways that climate change is going to make our planet a much worse place to live. In addition to more sever weather, both droughts and flooding, there’s rising sea levels, more massive wildfires, ocean acidification, the spread of tropical diseases etc, etc. Those are the direct effects of climate change but as Professor McGuire points out the growing scarcity of water and food, along with large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable will combine to drive migrations of whole populations, and greatly increase the chances for future conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Global warming isn’t just a disaster on land. The warming of the oceans is killing the coral reefs where half of all marine life exists. (Credit: NBC News)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It’s not a pretty picture and Professor McGuire doesn’t try to sugarcoat what’s coming. In fact he’s well aware that many people will regard him as an alarmist and he refuses to apologize for it, insisting that raising the alarm on climate change is a good thing. At the same time ‘Hothouse Earth’ also\u00a0 takes aim at both the climate deniers and the geoengineers who hope to invent some technical ‘fix’ to negate global warming. You may have heard on the news one or more of the many ideas put forward that propose to either reflect some of the Sun’s energy before it warms the Earth or suck all of the CO2<\/sub> out of the air so that we can continue to burn all of the fossil fuels we want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There are a lot of ‘ideas’ going around right now to ‘fix’ the climate crisis. None are as cheap or as sure, or as safe as simply stopping the burning of fossil fuels! (Credit: Phys.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While the deniers are simply obstinate fools the geoengineers at least recognize that there is a problem that needs to be solved. Their plans so far however vary between dangerous, like spraying massive amounts of sulfuric acid into the atmosphere to simulate the cooling caused by volcanic eruptions to simply much too expensive. We already know what the solution to global warming is, we’ve known it all along, stop burning fossil fuels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There simply can’t be anybody who thinks this is a good thing. But far too many people think it’s profitable and in our world money is more important than goodness! (Credit: BONews)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

‘Hothouse Earth’ isn’t a fun read, it isn’t meant to be. It is meant to raise the alarm because everyday now we hear about record setting temperatures in Dallas and Beijing, wildfires in Canada, droughts across Africa and on and on. We really are at a tipping point, it is thought that we could see a 1.5\u00baC temperature rise since Richard Arkwright’s time this very year. That 1.5\u00baC rise is thought by many climatologists to be a level where the effects of global warming increase significantly so we really are running out of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The hottest month ever measured and now officially over the 1.5 degree threshold scientists have been warning us about, July of 2023 will be long remembered as when the climate crisis began in earnest. (Credit: BBC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In other words things could be getting a lot worse real soon. If you want to do something about it then I strongly suggest that ‘Hothouse Earth’ by Bill McGuire is a good place to start.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m certain that it won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with this blog that I’m very much concerned with Climate Change \/ Global Warming and in fact with environmental issues in general. I know that more and more of my posts lately have been devoted to the damage that we ourselves are doing … Continue reading “Book Review: Hothouse Earth, an Inhabitants Guide by Bill McGuire”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1171,12],"tags":[2034,177,2037,2035,2036],"class_list":["post-7691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-science","tag-book-review-hothouse-earth-by-bill-mcguire","tag-climate-change","tag-geoengineering","tag-industrial-revolution","tag-svante-arrhenius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7691"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7705,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7691\/revisions\/7705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}