I got a new book called Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet at the end of last week. And to tell you the truth I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. Whenever I get a free moment I try to read a few pages more. It is such a great book!

Mark Lynas is the author of the book. He has also written High Tide, a superb book too (which I have also read). But what is this new book all about then? The title of the book is Six Degrees because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that at the end of this century global temperatures would have risen by between 1.4°C and 5.8°C (this worst-case scenario was raised to 6.4°C earlier this year).

My idea was to piece together all the available scientific projections for the impacts of this warming on a degree-by-degree basis, with a chapter for 1 degree, 2 degrees and so on up the scale.

The book is easy to read, easy to understand, interesting and just plain great. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand this book. It is written so that you and me can fully understand it.

If you are only thinking of buying one book this year then you should buy Six Degrees. If you aren’t thinking of buying any book at all please consider long (not too long) and hard about buying this book. Buy the book to your friends and families, I know I will.

Buy Six Degrees:
- Friends of the Earth
- Amazon.co.uk
- Amazon.com (This title will be released on January 22, 2008.)

Reviews of Six Degrees:
- The Independent, review by Marek Kohn on 13 April 2007.
- The Sunday Times, review by Fred Pearce on 8 April.
- Daily Mail, review by Hephzibah Anderson on 30 March.
- Guardian, review by Josh Lacey on 14 April.
- New Statesman, review by Johann Hari on 2 April.
- Financial Times, review by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney on 7 April.