Mark Lynas has worked for nearly a decade as a specialist on climate change and is the author of three books on the subject-"High Tide: News from a Warming World;" "Carbon Calculator;" and his newly-published "Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet."

Sifting through geological records, scientific data and computer models, Mark distills and projects the effect of global warming on humanity and the planet over the next hundred years. After that, he predicts, life, as we know it may no longer exist.

Mark believes survival depends upon taking action today. "I think there's a 50-50 chance we can avoid a devastating rise in global temperature. If you were diagnosed with a potentially deadly disease and given those odds, you wouldn't hesitate to go through treatment. So why wouldn't we respond the same way when the whole planet is at stake?"

In Six Degrees, Mark outlines what to expect from a warming world, degree by degree. At one degree Celsius (two degrees Fahrenheit), most coral reefs and many mountain glaciers will be lost. A three-degree-Celsius (five degrees Fahrenheit) rise would spell the collapse of the Amazon rain forest, the disappearance of Greenland's ice sheet and the creation of deserts across the Midwestern U.S. and southern Africa. At sixdegrees, most life on Earth, including humanity, would end.

As a broadcast commentator, journalist and author, Mark has a distinguished career. High Tide was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Award for Non-Fiction and short-listed for The Guardian First Book Award. Six Degrees has been long-listed for The Orwell Prize in 2008, and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. In 2008, National Geographic has produced a documentary based on Mark's book and titled Six Degrees Could Change the World.

Mark was selected as one of U.S. science journal Seed Magazine's "Revolutionary Minds" in 2004. In 2006, he was selected by National Geographic as one of its Emerging Explorers and was placed at no. 7 in the Independent's "Green List 2007." Mark also writes a column for the New Statesman Magazine and is a regular contributor to The Guardian in the U.K.

Born in Fiji and raised in Peru, Spain and the U.K., Mark graduated from the University of Edinburgh where he helped turn OneWorld.net into the world's most accessed Internet portal for human rights and sustainable development issues. He lives in Oxford, England.