Review of The Fate of the World by Bill McGuire

This is a very readable take on climate change that will be of interest to both those with little science background and – such is the sheer volume of climate science to mine – also more advanced readers: there are some neat insights herein.

There are many books on climate change but, as said, the topic is large and so there is a real case for multiple titles on this topic. This book's particular approach is to illuminate current and anticipated climate change though the prism of what we know about past climate change including climate change that took place literally billions of years ago: the past is a guide to the present and future of climate change.

Now, it has to be said that while we know quite a bit about past climate change, there is equally much – especially in the finer detail – we do not know. There are also quite a few rival theories regarding some aspects of past as well as anticipated future climate change. For instance, to take just one example, climate sensitivity – often defined as a measure of how much the Earth's climate would warm for doubling in carbon dioxide. Bill McGuire does not shy away from, and is up front about, such un certainty. Indeed, he occasionally presents rival explanations and hypotheses and makes a fair fist of this. A strength of this book is that this does not undermine our present climate change science view of matters as such debates on cutting edge research and hypotheses within the scientific community in no way usurps the core facts that we humans are very markedly affecting the global climate and that we are most certainly heading for a world that in decades (certainly not centuries) will be less conducive for humanity: that is to say people will die – very likely billions!

The journey he takes us on literally spans the history of our world beginning with our planet's formation and the early climate being warm despite the primordial Sun (note, proper noun) being cooler: an issue known as the faint young Sun paradox, through some of the major climate events in our world's history and along the way a number of aspects of the Earth system that affect and determine the climate.

Major climate events include the two Snowball Earth events (though here I perhaps am more in the camp that life had a bigger causal relationship to both these than Bill McGuire seems to be, but then I am very much a co-evolution of life and planet man). Other past events can be considered as analogues as to where be heading in the future including the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) – or Intitial Eocene Thermal Maximum (IETM) in old money a now dated term which I mention as students may want to Google Scholar this to see papers on earlier thoughts as to that event's nature and cause.

We get a chapter on oceans and this is important because the oceans are a key part of the Earth system that stores and releases both heat and carbon dioxide. It is also important to cover as sea-level rise is a critical dimension to global warming given that our species has a penchant for coastlines.

Another important chapter is entitled 'Shocks, Switches and See-Saws' as various components of the Earth system, and indeed the Earth system as a whole, can suddenly (in the geological sense but can be as fast as a few years or decades) switch state: a component of grand ocean currents (that together span the globe as the Broecker thermohaline conveyor) – what is called the AMOC (don't worry about what this is defined as in this review as the author explains it perfectly well) could effectively turn off and this would mean far colder winters for us here in Blighty!

There are many strengths to this book which the lay reader, seeking a little more understanding of climate change than you get from newspapers and much television, will value. And as said, even those more versed in climate science are likely to pick up on some new avenues in the academic literature to explore as the author has been around the block a good few times.

This book is coming out in 2026, which means I guess its pre-production (copy-editing, proofing, subject indexing and so forth) began early in 2025 and its submission and commissioning took place late in 2024. This is the way of all books and in science publishing terms we say that a book has an academic cut-off and this one's likely being in late 2024 means that it does not include much of what the US President Trump has shockingly done to US climate science. My advice – don't dwell on him, but do read this.

Non-Fiction Reviews

The Fate of the World

A history and the future of the climate crisis