A horror story, with the additional horror of being entirely backed by science.

I’m writing during the 2026 summer heatwaves in the UK, and this was really not the time to be reading this book. It lays bare the best estimates for changes caused by global heating to everything from diseases and food production to sea levels and increased earthquakes (caused by the land rebounding after the compression caused by ice is removed). The world envisaged is not entirely unlivable, but that’s only a slight comfort given the tribulations to come.

Had we acted on global heating at the time of the Stern review of 2006 it might have been possible to avoid the worst at a reasonable economic cost. (McGuire, interestingly, doesn’t mention Stern, whose conclusions have often been criticised for being understated in both risks and costs.) We’re now in a position where we have to make much more expensive and difficult carbon reductions to avoid terrible harms, while also having to incur massive costs to mitigate the harms that are already baked-in to the climate system.

It’s not a book that’s entirely without hope: the last chapter paints two pictures of London later in the century under different emission reduction scenarios that highlight that a warmer world would be liveable (and even pleasant) – but only after actions that frankly seem beyond us as a civilisation. McGuire points to the hypocrisy of world leaders as the COP26 conference, promising cuts while permitting more drilling: As I’m writing, more drilling permits are being issued by the new UK administration, and AI data centres are being proposed that will require local gas-fired power stations exceeding the current generation capacity of the entire UK electricity grid. It seems we still have to grasp the scale of changes required, with those changes growing the longer we wait.

5/5. Finished Saturday 18 July, 2026.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)