Bill McGuire’s most recent book related to climate change, Hothouse Earth, couldn’t have come out at a better moment. It will be available in stores this week. Notably, it will be browsed by readers who have just experienced record-breaking heat in the UK and now fear additional weeks of drought. Here’s all he has to say.
McGuire about climate change
McGuire is an emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. He says that this is only the beginning. “We have for far too long disregarded unequivocal warnings that rising carbon emissions are gravely warming the Earth.” He makes clear in his harsh description of the impending climate catastrophe. How devasting climate change can be. Now, that we have become complacent, we will pay for it with storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves that will easily transcend the extremes of the past.
There is no longer any way for us to prevent a dangerous, all-pervasive climatic breakdown
A future where deadly heatwaves and temperatures above 50ºC (120ºF) are common in the tropics. The summers at temperate latitudes will always be scorching hot. Moreover, our oceans are doomed to become heated, and acidic is what we may expect now. It is equally important to note that we have crossed the point of no return. According to McGuire, “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world than its grandparents did.”
“I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”
A temperature of 40.3ºC was registered in east England on July 19. It was one of the records broken during the book’s editing. One of the highest ever recorded temperatures in the UK. This year has also seen the ravaging of wildfires of previously unheard-of intensity and ferocity across Europe, North America, and Australia, while record rainfall in the midwest caused the catastrophic flooding in the US’s Yellowstone national park.
More details
McGuire finished writing Hothouse Earth at the end of 2021. He includes many of the record high temperatures that had just afflicted the planet, including extremes that had struck the UK. A few months after he completed his manuscript, and as publication loomed, he found that many of those records had already been broken. “That is the trouble with writing a book about climate breakdown,” says McGuire. “By the time it is published it is already out of date. That is how fast things are moving.”
