Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action
David Spratt and Philip Sutton
Scribe, 2008

Reviewed by Peter W. Newton

THIS is one of a growing number of books about climate change. Its title incorporates the key words “code red,” a medical term denoting a patient needing immediate and advanced life support. It is a powerful metaphor for our planet in relation to the symptoms beginning to materialise in relation to the “virus” of climate change (after Al Gore) which will rapidly accelerate as our planet progressively heats by one, two, three and possibly more degrees Celsius in the decades ahead. This would represent its most significant transition of the past 10,000 years – from an era of “remarkably stable climate that has allowed the whole period of human development to take place” (as the authors put it) to a future world with temperatures where livability as we know it becomes highly uncertain.