BUT WOULDN'T IT BE ON FOX NEWS?

Just a warning: If you read this (and you should, the whole thing) before you go to bed, you might have trouble sleeping.

However severe these unfolding climate-change impacts seem, they are - like the canary in the coal mine - just the first whispers of the holocaust that lies ahead if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists meeting under the banner of the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have predicted a warming during this century alone of up to six degrees Celsius, which would take the earth into dangerous uncharted waters. A few weeks ago, scientists at the UK's Hadley Centre reported that the warming might be even greater because of the complexities of the carbon cycle.

The IPCC's worst-case forecast of six degrees could prove almost unimaginably catastrophic. It took only six degrees of warming to spark the end-Permian mass extinction 251 million years ago, the worst crisis ever to hit life on earth (expertly chronicled by Michael Benton in When Life Nearly Died) which led to the deaths of 95 per cent of all species alive at the time.

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