SurRealClimate

Quaternary Research editor Eric Steig's latest RealClimate post acquits Six Degrees author Mark Lynas of  'Alarmism.' You know--scenes of 20 foot sea level rise, out-takes from The Day After Tomorrow, that sort of thing.

I don't suppose he's looked at the self-advertising on Lynas's website, which features this splendid vista of London --St. Paul's cathedral is 365 feet high:
" SIX DEGREES: OUR FUTURE ON A HOTTER PLANET
... reveals why the western US, southern Europe and Australia are likely to become uninhabitable"

                                       ANOTHER  FORECAST FROM LYNAS ' WEBSITE:
High Tide  –the acclaimed first book to tell the climate change story for a popular audience

"A glacier disappears high in the Peruvian Andes. Floodwaters surge across the English countryside. Ten thousand Pacific islanders begin to evacuate their homeland. A duststorm turns day into night across the Inner Mongolian plains.
...In this ground-breaking book, author Mark Lynas reveals... how global warming is hitting people’s lives, not in the future, but in our world today."

Comments

[Danny Bloom]

I agree that Mr Lynas's book, and he has a good blog too, is alarming, but not alarmist. As Andy Revkin wrote in his comment there: "The value of the approach taken by the book, and the IPCC process, is that it takes us on a sobering journey into various futures, just as Charles Dickens's story [Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come] did for Ebenezer Scrooge. Scenarios are a vital tool for designing responses... The question remains, will humans shift gears, like Scrooge did, or will current needs win out over future risks, however disconcerting?"

News that Mr Lynas is rewriting some of the UK edition for the upcoming US edition is welcome news, and should help the book reach more people with its important message.

I also see my polar cities research is being alarming, but not alarmist. I hoping and working to try to make sure that humans do shift gears, ASAP. But it will take some time, of course. Most likely, 30 more generations...

Danny Bloom, Polar Cities Research Project, http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

[Eric Steig]

Um.. You obviously didn't read what I wrote. You say in your blog that I "wonder how anyone could possibly think Six Degrees author Mark Lynas capable of 'Alarmism?'". I don't wonder that at all. I think it is a very natural (and possibly correct) reaction. The harder question is whether it really is alarmism. If you have a *cogent* argument about this, I'd be delighted to hear it.

RESPONSE :
My opening link to your piece enables readers to judge your meaning for for themselves.

I think it both coherent and germane that while your RC post _acquitted_ Lynas of hype his website is a minor masterpiece of the genre.

However your reservations are duly noted , and my lead now reflects that fact, though I wonder what you might have written had Lynas' literally over the top iconography been brought to your attention earlier. It is the woodcut equivalent of the air-brushed poster art of 'clear winter 'conjured up by the Creative Department of Porter Novelli a generation ago.

Hype happens, and as they say in London, it's a fair cop-