This year has seen record-high temperatures around the world, including in Japan, where triple-digit temperatures killed at least 86 people since May and hospitalized more than 20,000 over one week in July. According to scientists, this is an upward trend, and 2018 may be one of the hottest years on record. Here are three books that predict how global warming may affect humanity and what we can still do.

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SIX DEGREES

Our Future on a Hotter Planet

By Mark Lynas

336 pp. National Geographic. (2008)

In this book, Lynas draws on scientific research on climate change to predict how the planet will be affected by each degree of temperature rise. The Earth’s average global surface temperature has increased about 1 percent since 1880, and Lynas wrote that a 2 degree rise would constitute a point of no return. After 3 degrees, Greenland’s ice sheet would disappear, as would the Amazon, and deserts would begin to form across southern Africa and the American Midwest. Once we’ve reached 6 degrees, which is projected to happen by the end of the 21st century, most life on Earth would be eliminated, too.

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DRAWDOWN

The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

Edited by Paul Hawken

256 pp. Penguin Books. (2017)