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A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know
Thousands of people die every year from floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes and typhoons. Yet compared to what the Earth endured in prehistoric times-lethal volcanic winters, deadly asteroid collisions-our civilization has developed against a backdrop of relative geological
calm. Will this calm last? A Brief Guide to the End of the World looks at the frightful prospects that await us in the 21st century and beyond.
Bill McGuire, a leading expert in the field of geological hazards, admits that the omens are less than encouraging. Only 10,000 years after the last Ice Age, the Earth is sweltering in some of the highest temperatures it has ever seen. Overpopulation and the relentless exploitation of
natural resources, combined with rising temperatures and sea levels induced by greenhouse gases, are increasing the likelihood of natural catastrophes, from continuing El Ninos, to large-scale glacial melting, to mega-tsunami. Even more disturbing is the near certainty that we are headed toward
another asteroid or comet collision on the scale of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. In this provocative and immensely readable guidebook, McGuire discusses when these catastrophic events are likely to take place, how they will effect our global society, and what we can do to increase our
chances of survival--from emissions reductions, to massive geo-engineering schemes, to the colonization of space.
Illustrated with photographs and diagrams, and backed by meticulous research, A Brief Guide to the End of the World sheds new light on the extraordinarily vulnerability of our planet, and on our capacity to withstand the dramatic changes Mother Nature has in store for us in the distant--or
not so distant--future.
calm. Will this calm last? A Brief Guide to the End of the World looks at the frightful prospects that await us in the 21st century and beyond.
Bill McGuire, a leading expert in the field of geological hazards, admits that the omens are less than encouraging. Only 10,000 years after the last Ice Age, the Earth is sweltering in some of the highest temperatures it has ever seen. Overpopulation and the relentless exploitation of
natural resources, combined with rising temperatures and sea levels induced by greenhouse gases, are increasing the likelihood of natural catastrophes, from continuing El Ninos, to large-scale glacial melting, to mega-tsunami. Even more disturbing is the near certainty that we are headed toward
another asteroid or comet collision on the scale of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. In this provocative and immensely readable guidebook, McGuire discusses when these catastrophic events are likely to take place, how they will effect our global society, and what we can do to increase our
chances of survival--from emissions reductions, to massive geo-engineering schemes, to the colonization of space.
Illustrated with photographs and diagrams, and backed by meticulous research, A Brief Guide to the End of the World sheds new light on the extraordinarily vulnerability of our planet, and on our capacity to withstand the dramatic changes Mother Nature has in store for us in the distant--or
not so distant--future.
212 pages, Paperback
First published March 21, 2002
3 people are currently reading
83 people want to read
About the author
Bill McGuire
19 books10 followersBill McGuire is an academic, broadcaster, activist and Amazon UK Top 100 popular science and speculative fiction writer. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, a co-director of the New Weather Institute, a patron of Scientists for Global Responsibility, a member of the scientific advisory board of Scientists Warning and special scientific advisor to WordForest.org.
His books include: A Guide to the End of the World: Everything you Never Wanted to Know; Surviving Armageddon: Solutions for a Threatened Planet; and Seven Years to Save the Planet. His current non-fiction book is Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes; ranked at number five in The Guardian's Top 10 'eco' books. His debut novel, Skyseed – an eco-thriller about climate engineering gone wrong – is published by The Book Guild.
His books include: A Guide to the End of the World: Everything you Never Wanted to Know; Surviving Armageddon: Solutions for a Threatened Planet; and Seven Years to Save the Planet. His current non-fiction book is Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes; ranked at number five in The Guardian's Top 10 'eco' books. His debut novel, Skyseed – an eco-thriller about climate engineering gone wrong – is published by The Book Guild.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 17, 2008
On Amazon.com this book has 2 reviews- one is a well-deserved 5 star rating, the other is a 1 star review.
Out of curiosity, I read the 1 star review.
Apparently, the reason the reader gave it 1 star was not because it was badly written or poorly researched, or any of the reasons you might assume, no.
It was too scary.
It was frightening, depressing, and TRUE.
It left them feeling impotent, doomed, and hopeless.
Essentially, this book was reviewed poorly because it was RIGHT. And considering the subject matter, that is pretty scary.
Global climate change; both warming and a potential ice age are addressed, a problem I've long sought an answer to. He tells us about mega volcanoes, earthquakes, asteroids, tidal waves, comets, and more... It's beautifully written- both easy to read but intelligent enough to hold the readers attention.
I was absolutely satisfied by this book. I would reccomend it to anyone who doesn't mind being told their planet is mortal.
Out of curiosity, I read the 1 star review.
Apparently, the reason the reader gave it 1 star was not because it was badly written or poorly researched, or any of the reasons you might assume, no.
It was too scary.
It was frightening, depressing, and TRUE.
It left them feeling impotent, doomed, and hopeless.
Essentially, this book was reviewed poorly because it was RIGHT. And considering the subject matter, that is pretty scary.
Global climate change; both warming and a potential ice age are addressed, a problem I've long sought an answer to. He tells us about mega volcanoes, earthquakes, asteroids, tidal waves, comets, and more... It's beautifully written- both easy to read but intelligent enough to hold the readers attention.
I was absolutely satisfied by this book. I would reccomend it to anyone who doesn't mind being told their planet is mortal.
August 18, 2019
Chicken Little was right
There's a lot to worry about here, and frankly I'm worried. The main disaster that I didn't know about until I read this intriguing little book is the volcanic "super-eruption." Take your standard volcanic blast and multiply it by something like a thousand and one begins to get the picture. Not only that, but a super-eruption isn't necessarily going to happen around the old fault lines or Vulcan sites. No, a super-eruption with enough power to usher in a "volcanic winter" can happen suddenly without warning virtually anywhere.
The really scary thing about super-eruptions is that not only can't they be predicted, they can't be prevented. In this sense they are worse than an earth-crossing asteroid or unleashed Oort Cloud comets. We might be able to see a meteor coming our way and with current technology nudge it off its course or blast it into smaller pieces, but there is absolutely nothing we can do about a super-eruption. Even if the super-eruption takes place halfway around the world, its effects, possibly leading to a civilization-ending volcanic winter, will be felt everywhere. With the social disruption, the disease, and the cold and starvation, the living (to recall a phrase from the Cold War) may very well envy the dead.
McGuire, who is Benfield Greig Professor of Geophysical Hazards at University College London, recalls for our delectation, "perhaps the greatest volcanic explosion ever" that took place at Toba in northern Sumatra 73,500 years ago. It qualified as a Volcanic Explosivity Index 8 (VEI 8) event, which means it was about one thousand times as powerful as the VEI 5 1980 blast at Mount St. Helens. It tore a hole in the ground one hundred kilometers across and sent an estimated 3,000 cubic kilometers (that's kilometers) of debris into the atmosphere, enough "to cover virtually the whole of India with a layer of ash one metre thick." (pp. 98-103) A volcanic winter of perhaps six years followed with "up to 5,000 million tonnes of sulphuric acid aerosols" in the air, enough to "cut the amount of sunlight reaching the surface by 90 per cent." (p. 104) An ice age followed, perhaps triggered by the mammoth eruption. McGuire goes on to speculate that so many humans died world wide that humanity went through a "population bottleneck" that almost sent us the way of the dinosaurs. (pp. 105-107)
McGuire, who sometimes refers to himself as "Disasterman" (p. 131), also looks at "The Threat from Space" (Chapter 5). He separates the asteroids from the comets and guesses that our chance of being killed during an asteroid or comet walloping is "750 times more likely than winning the UK lottery." To me, the really scary "from outer space" scenario is a hoard of comets being dislodged from their normal orbits to fly toward mother earth, so many that we would have no ability to ward them off.
Global warming and the coming ice age are also topics explored by the good professor. Earthquakes and tsunamis have their chapter and there is an Epilogue (in which he notes, e.g., that come the year 2100 "an extraordinary 50 per cent or so of the people in Japan and western Europe will be 60" years old or older). There are a couple of appendices showing "threat" and geological timescales, and a modest index. The chapter on global warming, I must say, left me somewhat confused. Clearly McGuire believes human activity is a factor in making the nineties the hottest decade ever recorded, but whether our pollution will melt the ice caps or help to usher in an ice age is not clear.
Some other items of interest in this very readable book:
There was a geological episode in the earth's history referred to as "the Cryogenian" in which the earth was covered by "a carapace of ice a kilometre thick." McGuire calls this "Snowball Earth" and when it finally melted 565 million years ago, the Cambrian explosion of life followed. (p. 69-71)
An earthquake in the Tokyo-Yokohama region similar in intensity (8.3 on the Richter Scale) to that which struck in 1923--a reprise, McGuire says, is "thought to be only decades away"--would cripple the Japanese economy and have disastrous world wide effects. (pp. 123-131)
The so-called "Contraction & Convergence" plan "to reduce greenhouse gas emissions" that would require monitoring and billing polluters for their emissions on a per capita basis: to me, this requirement would reveal the true cost of various enterprises and would help us to move toward renewable production and ecologically sound business practices.
Not to be picky, but on page 18 McGuire reports that Hurricane Andrew of 1992 "brought to bear on the city" of Miami "wind speeds of up to 300 kilometres per second." That's about 670,000 miles per hour! (I suspect he meant wind speeds of 300 kilometres per HOUR.)
Bottom line: fascinating, a little flippant at times, but a full-out good read by a man who knows what he is talking about.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
There's a lot to worry about here, and frankly I'm worried. The main disaster that I didn't know about until I read this intriguing little book is the volcanic "super-eruption." Take your standard volcanic blast and multiply it by something like a thousand and one begins to get the picture. Not only that, but a super-eruption isn't necessarily going to happen around the old fault lines or Vulcan sites. No, a super-eruption with enough power to usher in a "volcanic winter" can happen suddenly without warning virtually anywhere.
The really scary thing about super-eruptions is that not only can't they be predicted, they can't be prevented. In this sense they are worse than an earth-crossing asteroid or unleashed Oort Cloud comets. We might be able to see a meteor coming our way and with current technology nudge it off its course or blast it into smaller pieces, but there is absolutely nothing we can do about a super-eruption. Even if the super-eruption takes place halfway around the world, its effects, possibly leading to a civilization-ending volcanic winter, will be felt everywhere. With the social disruption, the disease, and the cold and starvation, the living (to recall a phrase from the Cold War) may very well envy the dead.
McGuire, who is Benfield Greig Professor of Geophysical Hazards at University College London, recalls for our delectation, "perhaps the greatest volcanic explosion ever" that took place at Toba in northern Sumatra 73,500 years ago. It qualified as a Volcanic Explosivity Index 8 (VEI 8) event, which means it was about one thousand times as powerful as the VEI 5 1980 blast at Mount St. Helens. It tore a hole in the ground one hundred kilometers across and sent an estimated 3,000 cubic kilometers (that's kilometers) of debris into the atmosphere, enough "to cover virtually the whole of India with a layer of ash one metre thick." (pp. 98-103) A volcanic winter of perhaps six years followed with "up to 5,000 million tonnes of sulphuric acid aerosols" in the air, enough to "cut the amount of sunlight reaching the surface by 90 per cent." (p. 104) An ice age followed, perhaps triggered by the mammoth eruption. McGuire goes on to speculate that so many humans died world wide that humanity went through a "population bottleneck" that almost sent us the way of the dinosaurs. (pp. 105-107)
McGuire, who sometimes refers to himself as "Disasterman" (p. 131), also looks at "The Threat from Space" (Chapter 5). He separates the asteroids from the comets and guesses that our chance of being killed during an asteroid or comet walloping is "750 times more likely than winning the UK lottery." To me, the really scary "from outer space" scenario is a hoard of comets being dislodged from their normal orbits to fly toward mother earth, so many that we would have no ability to ward them off.
Global warming and the coming ice age are also topics explored by the good professor. Earthquakes and tsunamis have their chapter and there is an Epilogue (in which he notes, e.g., that come the year 2100 "an extraordinary 50 per cent or so of the people in Japan and western Europe will be 60" years old or older). There are a couple of appendices showing "threat" and geological timescales, and a modest index. The chapter on global warming, I must say, left me somewhat confused. Clearly McGuire believes human activity is a factor in making the nineties the hottest decade ever recorded, but whether our pollution will melt the ice caps or help to usher in an ice age is not clear.
Some other items of interest in this very readable book:
There was a geological episode in the earth's history referred to as "the Cryogenian" in which the earth was covered by "a carapace of ice a kilometre thick." McGuire calls this "Snowball Earth" and when it finally melted 565 million years ago, the Cambrian explosion of life followed. (p. 69-71)
An earthquake in the Tokyo-Yokohama region similar in intensity (8.3 on the Richter Scale) to that which struck in 1923--a reprise, McGuire says, is "thought to be only decades away"--would cripple the Japanese economy and have disastrous world wide effects. (pp. 123-131)
The so-called "Contraction & Convergence" plan "to reduce greenhouse gas emissions" that would require monitoring and billing polluters for their emissions on a per capita basis: to me, this requirement would reveal the true cost of various enterprises and would help us to move toward renewable production and ecologically sound business practices.
Not to be picky, but on page 18 McGuire reports that Hurricane Andrew of 1992 "brought to bear on the city" of Miami "wind speeds of up to 300 kilometres per second." That's about 670,000 miles per hour! (I suspect he meant wind speeds of 300 kilometres per HOUR.)
Bottom line: fascinating, a little flippant at times, but a full-out good read by a man who knows what he is talking about.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
February 19, 2009
Tsunamis, earthquakes, asteroids, comets, global warming, a new ice age, volcanoes, this book has it all but it is real science not science fiction. He does a great job of explaining how the earth as we currently know it ould come to an end. And I thought I was a prophet of doom. We should marvel at how lucky we are here on Earth to live in a rather benign locaiton in the milky way galaxy in a benign time in the universe's current life. With that the Earth is still a hazardous place.
April 22, 2017
Excellent. Sufficient science to be interesting - sufficient lack of complexity to be readable for an hour without blowing your mind. Ironically, starting from the back and doing chapters in reverse order makes the book more accessible as the into is a bit long. Ignore the global warming chapter - more up to date books out there but for asteroids, comets, volcanos, tsunamis and quakes - all here. We're all going to die - just a matter of when. Great read :)
December 15, 2010
Was hoping for some more man-made disaster scenarios...
November 7, 2012
Too bad it is so outdated, I thought it was a great review of the earth's challenges.
January 21, 2021
I really enjoyed that - it totally took mind off Covid!
August 16, 2021
A good balance between succinct and detailed. A survey of the natural means by which the world as we know it could end, including volcanoes, asteroids/comets, tsunamis, global warming & ice ages. Author writes in a familiar style that somehow manages to not dumb down the science involved. He talks technical & uses historical & geological referents to explain the topics. One of the best balanced pop sci books I’ve read.
He addresses how our global warming may, counterintuitively, actually hasten the next ice age, and how a major earthquake in Tokyo could hobble the global economy—that’s something I’ve never considered.
He addresses how our global warming may, counterintuitively, actually hasten the next ice age, and how a major earthquake in Tokyo could hobble the global economy—that’s something I’ve never considered.
May 29, 2008
Global warming is just one possible scenario for the end of the world and Bill McGuire wants to discuss in loving detail all the catastrophic ways in which humanity will end. He does this by evaluating past catastrophes and assessing their probable effects. All the usual suspects are there; the Canary or Hawaiian Islands collapse and tsunamis, cessation of the North Atlantic thermal interchange, meteors (quite small ones, actually), ice ages, melting ice packs, etc. Mr. McGuire seems to believe that humanity will never survive to see the sun go out, we will all be blown up, frozen, burned, starved, or irradiated well before that time. He doesn't seem to be concerned with thermonuclear war as a causative agent. In fact he mentions 'nuclear winter' merely as a comparison with the eruption of Mt. Toba.
All in all, he is much more aware of volcanoes than ICBMs.
All in all, he is much more aware of volcanoes than ICBMs.
February 5, 2016
Well-written, concise, yet scary! All the things you don't need to worry about but now you will!
January 12, 2019
Pleasantly readable and focuses (refreshingly) on solely natural disasters--accidents of astronomy, geology, meteorology.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews