Point of no return has been reached in terms of stopping the whole climate meltdown: Experts

The release of Bill McGuire’s most recent book, Hothouse Earth, couldn’t have happened at a better time. This week, it will be accessible in stores, where customers who just experienced record-breaking heat in the UK can now worry about additional weeks of drought.

This is just the beginning, according to McGuire, an emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. He makes it apparent in his stark assessment of the looming climate catastrophe that we have – for far too long – ignored unambiguous warnings that rising carbon emissions are seriously warming the Earth. We shall pay for our complacency now with devastating storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves that will easily surpass the ones of the past.

The biggest problem, according to him, is that we are no longer able to stop a deadly, all-pervasive climatic breakdown. We may be looking at a future where catastrophic heatwaves and temperatures beyond 50C (120F) are typical in the tropics, where summers at temperate latitudes will always be sweltering hot, and where our oceans are destined to become heated and acidic. A child born in 2020 ‘will face a significantly more hostile society than its grandparents experienced,’ claims McGuire.

One of the records broken during the book’s editing was the revelation that a temperature of 40.3C was observed in east England on July 19—the highest temperature ever recorded 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.