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The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

David Wallace-Wells (Goodreads Author)

4.06 · Rating details · 17,849 ratings · 2,986 reviews

The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.

Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popula ...more

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Paperback, 336 pages

Published September 5th 2019 by Penguin (first published February 19th 2019)

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Jun 29, 2019 Manny rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Manny by: howl of minerva

Shelves: history-and-biography, science

[Original review: Jun 29 2019]

A well-written, straightforward and honest book about climate change. The situation is even worse than I thought it was, and I was already far from optimistic.

One of the things the author spells out, which I had not properly grasped before, is that climate change will affect different parts of the world very differently. For low-lying equatorial Bangladesh, it is a catastrophe. It sounds like the country may soon - within the next few decades - be rendered uninhabi [Original review: Jun 29 2019]

A well-written, straightforward and honest book about climate change. The situation is even worse than I thought it was, and I was already far from optimistic.

One of the things the author spells out, which I had not properly grasped before, is that climate change will affect different parts of the world very differently. For low-lying equatorial Bangladesh, it is a catastrophe. It sounds like the country may soon - within the next few decades - be rendered uninhabitable, primarily due to flooding caused by sea level rise. For India, it is not quite as bad, but still terrible. But for Russia, which is so far north that much of its area is currently Arctic wilderness, climate change could end up being a net plus. Russia may be the only country for which this is true. In addition, most of its income comes from fossil fuels. It is easy to see why Putin is overtly taking the position that climate change is a myth. I am sure he does not believe what he is saying. But climate change acts to his advantage, so he welcomes it.

I would very much like to know what is really going on inside the Trump administration. They also take the official line that climate change is not a major issue, but again it is hard to take this seriously. This book says that the Pentagon are doing extensive threat analysis and war-gaming of conflicts likely to be caused by climate change, and I think Trump's government is well aware of the real state of affairs. They are hardening their immigration policy and strengthening their defences along the southern border, which is consistent with the expectation that large parts of Central and South America will also become uninhabitable in the near future. The US expects a tide of climate refugees, and the intention is to deny them entry, using whatever level of force is required. I note that plans are being made to lower the threshold at which nuclear weapons can be deployed. But the US is not Russia, and it is going to be hit quite hard; for example, most of Florida will probably be underwater by the end of the century. They will have their own displaced people. I wonder if they are planning to annex Canada. It looks tempting, and with international law already weakened it is hard to see that the US could be meaningfully penalised. If I were Canada, I would think about getting some nuclear weapons.

Brexit also makes a lot more sense. Britain is one of the most northerly European countries, and being an island is better placed than most to defend itself from climate refugees; they also have thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems. It looks as though right-wing British politicians are in the process of aligning themselves with the increasingly open Russia-US axis.

In theory, it might still be just about possible to create a worldwide coalition with the goal of reducing emissions and limiting the effects of climate change to the point where our current civilisation could continue. The Dems in the US are right: a Green New Deal might make the crucial difference, it's now or never. But with the deck stacked against them in multiple ways, I wonder if they have a real chance of winning the 2020 election. My guess is it's going to be dog eat dog.

Well, it's always nice to find out what's actually going on.
______________________

[Update: Aug 19 2019]

This just in: Donald Trump says he'd like to discuss the idea of buying Greenland.

Now why would he want to do that?
...more

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Feb 21, 2019 Ryan Boissonneault rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Whether or not you will find this book valuable depends on what you’re looking for; if you’re interested in the science of, or evidence for, global warming, or in creative solutions to save the planet, then you are bound to be, like me, disappointed.

The book, rather, focuses almost exclusively on the potential consequences of living on a planet that will experience anywhere from 2 to 8 degrees celsius of warming between now and the year 2100.

First, to state the obvious, global warming is defin Whether or not you will find this book valuable depends on what you’re looking for; if you’re interested in the science of, or evidence for, global warming, or in creative solutions to save the planet, then you are bound to be, like me, disappointed.

The book, rather, focuses almost exclusively on the potential consequences of living on a planet that will experience anywhere from 2 to 8 degrees celsius of warming between now and the year 2100.

First, to state the obvious, global warming is definitely happening, it’s mostly caused by human activity, and the consequences are and will be devastating. This is all beyond reasonable doubt; if you think otherwise, you stand in direct opposition to NASA and to an intergovernmental panel of 1,300 experts from around the world.

But what isn’t so conclusive is the inevitability of the worst-case scenario playing out as Wallace-Wells describes. In fact, when reading the book, it seems as if half the time the author isn’t even buying into his own narrative. He constantly wavers back and forth between exaggeration and hedging, at first narrating some devastating scenario and then reminding us that it’s only speculation. (Keep in mind he’s forecasting events up to 80 years in the future, when we have no idea what kind of technology we’ll have and how the complex climate feedback loops will interact.)

And that’s the real problem with the book. From the outset the author states that this is not a book about the science of climate change, but if your plan is to narrate the consequences of warming, how can you expect your readers to properly evaluate the likelihood of the narrative without the science?

If you want to learn more about global warming, you would get more benefit from visiting NASA’s website on global warming and climate change. Here you will get the facts, science, causes, and consequences of climate change without the alarmist tone and pessimistic narrative.

Yes, climate change is a big problem, maybe the biggest problem, and one we need to address immediately, but it doesn’t help anyone to project the worst-case scenario 80 years into the future without offering anything in the way of solutions. If anything, it causes people to care less about climate change as they feel powerless to prevent it.

A better allocation of chapters for the book, in my opinion, would be one third devoted to the science, one-third devoted to the possible consequences at each degree of warming, and a third devoted to possible solutions and technological research. Instead, we get a book that lists disaster after unmitigated disaster and wild apocalyptic projections. (Compare this to the recently released book on climate change offering productive solutions: A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.)

Here’s another way to think about it: those of us that understand the science do not need to be scared into thinking that we need to take action, and so his narrative is unlikely to have much of an impact on his sympathetic audience. And for those that doubt the science of global warming to begin with, the narrative is easily dismissed as he doesn’t address the science. So who exactly is the intended readership and what’s the goal?

The bottom line is that there are better resources and books on both the science of climate change and the potential solutions.
...more

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Apr 23, 2019 Bill Kerwin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ecology, science, 21st-c-amer, nonficion

In July of 2017, in New York Magazine, David Wallace-Wells published an article on climate change entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” It began with these words: “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” Now Wallace-Wells has turned that article into a book, and—if anything—he has doubled down. “It is worse,” the book begins, “much worse, than you think.”

It is, it surely is. And Wallace-Wells pulls no punches. He does not fog the facts with statistics, or conceal his rage and sorrow under a scien
In July of 2017, in New York Magazine, David Wallace-Wells published an article on climate change entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” It began with these words: “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” Now Wallace-Wells has turned that article into a book, and—if anything—he has doubled down. “It is worse,” the book begins, “much worse, than you think.”

It is, it surely is. And Wallace-Wells pulls no punches. He does not fog the facts with statistics, or conceal his rage and sorrow under a scientist mask. No, for this is not a book of science; it is just what he says it is. “This is not a book about the science of warming; it is a book about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.” He paints pictures of what human life will be like at various degrees of warming; grim even if we mitigate the rising temperature, horrific if we continue to do virtually nothing.

The entire book is good, but the opening sequence “Cascades”—a section of roughly thirty pages--is particularly powerful. Wallace-Wells makes it clear that our warmer future will not consist of isolable challenges; no, instead everything will hit the fan at once. As Hamlet’s uncle Claudius once said, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies,/ But in battalions.” Wallace-Wells puts it eloquently too:

The assaults will not be discrete—this is another climate delusion. Instead, they will produce a new kind of cascading violence, waterfalls and avalanches of devastation, the planet pummeled again and again, with increasing intensity and in ways that build on each other and undermine our ability to respond . . .”

The second sequence, “The Elements of Chaos,”—a hundred pages or so—artificially isolates twelve of these cascading dangers (Heat Death,” “Hunger,” “Drowning,” etc.) into individual chapters, and discusses the contribution of each. In these chapters Wallace-Wells often becomes frighteningly specific, mentioning deleterious effects I would never have anticipated. Consider this passage in “Hunger”:

Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. . . Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

Or this little parable in “Plagues of Warming”:

But consider the case of the saiga—the adorable, dwarflike antelope, native to Central Asia. In May 2015, nearly two-thirds of the global population died in the span of just days—every single said in an area the size of Florida . . . The culprit, it turned out, was a simple bacteria, Pasteurella multocide, which had lived inside the saiga’s tonsils without threatening its hosts in any way, for many, many generations . . . Suddenly it had proliferated . . . Why? “The places where the saiga died in 2015 were extremely warm and humid . . . When the temperature gets really hot, and the air gets really wet, saiga die. Climate is the trigger, Pasteurella is the bullet.”

In the third section, “The Climate Kaleidoscope”—about seventy-five pages—Wallace-Wells treats briefly with some ways we can attempt to make sense of the climate crisis, as we contemplate the possible death of humankind, alone—at least as far as we can tell—in a vast universe (“Storytelling," “Crisis Capitalism,” The Church of Technology,” etc.), and he ends the books with a brief coda—”The Anthropic Principle”—in which he shares the somewhat optimistic way in which he has come to view the human dilemma. True, it is “a sort of gimmicky tautology” that reminds me of the circular logic that brought us, in earlier centuries, the dubious comforts of Anselm’s ontological argument and Pascal’s wager. It is certainly a leap in the dark. Still, it’s better than nothing:

[T]he Anthropic Principle . . . takes the human anomaly not as a puzzle to explain away but as the centerpiece of a grand narcissistic view of the cosmos. . . . [H]owever unlikely it may seem that intelligent civilization arose in an infinity of lifeless gas, and however lonely we appear to be in the universe, in fact something like the world we live on and the one we’ve built are a sort of logical inevitability, given that we are asking these questions at all—because only a universe compatible with our sort of conscious life would produce anything capable of contemplating it like this. . . .

There is one civilization we know of, and it is still alive and kicking—for now at least. Why should we be suspicious of our exceptionality, or choose to understand it only by assuming an imminent demise? Why not choose to feel empowered by it?

...more

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Nov 16, 2019 Mario the lone bookwolf rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 0-social-criticism, 0-natural-sciences

The aspects are so manifold that some are not even included in the prognostics and Wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planeta... shows, how vast and complex the possibilities of doom are.

Simple heat is something that can lead to inhospitality after a very short time. Like in space, where heat is a great problem for manned space flight, it is very difficult to cool a system down again as soon as it has reached a certain point. So how can humanity heat up as quick as possible?

Actually we do it w ...more

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Feb 18, 2019 Lou rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The most accurate terminology to describe this book: absolutely terrifying. It has the same impact a fantastic horror movie or novel does but with one very important difference - THIS IS REAL. If this doesn't wake earth's inhabitants up to our self-made, self-inflicted impending doom I don't know what will. I must add that this is so stark and horrifying that on the night I completed it I failed to sleep for thinking about everything David Wallace-Wells opens our eyes to. One of the hardest-hitt The most accurate terminology to describe this book: absolutely terrifying. It has the same impact a fantastic horror movie or novel does but with one very important difference - THIS IS REAL. If this doesn't wake earth's inhabitants up to our self-made, self-inflicted impending doom I don't know what will. I must add that this is so stark and horrifying that on the night I completed it I failed to sleep for thinking about everything David Wallace-Wells opens our eyes to. One of the hardest-hitting and thought-provoking works of nonfiction I've read in years, but it isn't for the faint of heart, and I've come to expect most people prefer to be ignorant to the truth rather than learning, accepting and then exploring ways to help make the situation better. However, it may already be too late, and unfortunately, this is one of those times where the adage "better late than never" does not apply.

If you're expecting a laid-back thesis on the ramifications of climate change then you have come to the wrong place; this is a wake-up call and a call to action. Time is no longer on our side in climate matters which is why books such as this are incredibly important. I have long been taught that if you cause something unexpected to happen that you at least try to put it right. It's like the object of civil liability in law which aims to put the victim back into the position they were in before the crime was committed, and whilst we can’t achieve that we can do things to change the destructive trajectory in which we are heading, but we must take heed and act post-haste.

All those seemingly subliminal messages we see, hear and internalise day in day out come together in this book and the author pulls no punches in bringing climate issues to readers consciousness and shouting loud and clear about the issues we face. His passion and commitment to the subject shine through, and although this holds some very scary messages there are also reasons to be hopeful. Ultimately, though, this is a masterful account of how we are well on our way to destroying our planet and ought to be in every school, public library and on the shelves of those of us who care about what the future will hold for our descendants.

Many thanks to Allen Lane for an ARC. ...more

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May 04, 2019 Brooke rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This book has 5-star material, but a 1-star execution. As someone who is incredibly concerned about our planet and our future, I had such high hopes for this book, but I’ve been left frustrated and disappointed. I knew going into it that the topic wouldn’t make for an easy read, but the writing was so dry and repetitive that I had a hard time focusing. What could have been said in a couple sentences was instead stretched out into several pages – and then repeated using different words shortly af ...more

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Jun 28, 2019 Trevor rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: behavioural-economics, history, medicine, science, economics

One of my favourite Australian novels is Peter Carey’s Bliss. That starts with Harry Joy (isn’t that one of the best names of a character ever?) having a wonderful Christmas party with his family and friends – he has the perfect life and he could hardly be happier. Then just like that, BANG…he has a heart attack and dies. And just as suddenly he is brought back to life – a miracle, no less – he was dead and now he’s alive again. Except that now he finds out that his wife is having an affair with One of my favourite Australian novels is Peter Carey’s Bliss. That starts with Harry Joy (isn’t that one of the best names of a character ever?) having a wonderful Christmas party with his family and friends – he has the perfect life and he could hardly be happier. Then just like that, BANG…he has a heart attack and dies. And just as suddenly he is brought back to life – a miracle, no less – he was dead and now he’s alive again. Except that now he finds out that his wife is having an affair with his best friend, his son is a drug dealer and his daughter is giving his son blowjobs so she can get free drugs, and the advertising company he owns is helping to sell products that are killing the planet. Mr Joy comes to believe, not unreasonably, that he is now in hell and he only thinks he is alive.

In a similar way, I think I might have died sometime early in 2016. I mean, since then I’ve struggled to understand the world I’m living in. Ma sotto voce – I should just mention: the election of Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdoğan and Morrison, and, of course, climate change…

This book is a book of horrors. It makes ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ look like what I guess it must have actually been – a best-case scenario. At one point in this he says that he is an optimist and that he believes we will eventually do something to mitigate the destruction of the planet we are living on. You know, the only one in the universe we actually know will support us. But I’ve got to warn you, if you are reading this book for any good news, you’ve picked up the wrong book. I feel like I’ve been pummelled.

Now, I’ve said it before and I will say it again – and I will say it over and over again – I’m a pessimist. I actually think it is already too late, we had our chance and we blew it. This book explains just how terrible and costly our mistakes over the last 20 years or so are are going to prove. And we don’t even have an excuse. I mean, sure, you can say something like, well, all of this was done before I was born, as if that made sense – that this is all about the industrial revolution and that there has been 200 years of compound interest debts that have now suddenly fallen due. The only problem is, none of this is quite true – to me the most terrifying statistic in a book was – and I quote, “we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilisation since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries – all the millennia – that came before”. The blood that you can see is mostly on our own hands.

Now, I’ve an uncle who is deeply religious and is the sort of person that, when there is a cold day in winter, will say, ‘and where’s your climate change now?’ Yeah, I know – I could tell him the difference between weather and climate, I could say that 8 of the hottest 7 days in history were in the last week, or whatever the figures are – but the point is that the President of the US is even more of a climate change denier than my uncle. Like I said today when I was explaining this book to someone – for some reason I’ve been mis-quoting Shakespeare a lot lately – we are in shit stepped so far that we can’t even smell it any more. The author of this says there is not a single country on the planet that will meet its commitments under the Paris agreements. You know, I don’t think we are quite focused on the problem yet.

We are, it seems, about to see the world turned on its head. Something I read a few years ago said that soon (a decade or so from then) the planet will only be able to sustain about half a billion people. That is, seven billion people will need to die and they will be provided that opportunity in quick time. And before you congratulate yourself for being clever enough to have chosen parents who lived in a first world country to be born – admittedly, the effects of climate change will be much, much worse for brown and black people, but no one gets out of this okay. Not even the extreme nastiness that is Australia’s refugee policy or the US child separation nightmare will be enough to save us from the tidal wave that is coming. Nor will the Arab Spring or the war in Syria look like anything more than a kind of picnic, it will all appear as nothing when, as the author says, a billion people are on the move because there is literally no water for them to drink where they are and when the daytime temperatures are so hot that if they stay where they are it will mean they will effectively boiling alive.

He makes it clear that the ‘technological fixes’ we imagine are about to save us are based on that one gift the gods left us when Pandora opened her box – misplaced hope. And if you are confident that science will find an answer, you need to remember that every time science has come up with a means to mitigate the disaster we are about to face – we’ve found ways to make the situation a hundred times worse. So that while the cost of solar panels has fallen 80 percent since 2009, and while lots of people have dutifully strapped them onto their houses, carbon output into the atmosphere has increased.

I would like to think that ultimately the author will be proven right – that eventually climate change will be so obvious that even my uncle and Donald Trump will think, ‘shit, someone should have done something about this!’ Except, I’ve just been through an election here in Australia, and I can’t particularly say it proved all that reassuring. It was dubbed the ‘climate change election’ – climate change won, by the way. A month or so before that election a million fish died in Menindee – in the Murray-Darling basin. A million fish. Here’s a wee video of it - https://www.theguardian.com/australia... Menindee is in the federal electorate of Parkes. And the good people of Parkes decided to vote in a member of the National Party in the election that followed this slaughter – that is, a party of climate change deniers. At least half of the Great Barrier Reef is dead and the Labor Party only won one seat in the whole of Queensland, and certainly none in far north Queensland. It really isn’t clear to me what it will take – I mean, if this isn’t enough, what evidence would people need?

Really, I just have to assume we are dead men walking and that there is nothing that will save us – we are all literally that stupid.

Oh well. ...more

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Feb 20, 2019 Radiantflux rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, environmentalism-and-politics, natural_world

32nd book for 2019.

Wallace-Wells shows in stunning detail just how bad the global neo-liberal consumption=happiness after-party is going to be, and just how soon the lights are going to come on.

We are currently at 1-degree warming. We are going to sail pass the 2-degree barrier agreed upon by Paris (that's just a fact). If we are really lucky we might stabilize at 3-4 degrees above baseline (there are no guarantees as some poorly understood feedback loops might push us significantly past this po ...more

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Apr 30, 2019 David rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ecology, environment, science, engineering, technology, politics

This is an exceptional, must-read book about the prognosis for our planet Earth. The prognosis is not a happy one--it is truly depressing. If things continue at the present pace, by 2100, temperatures will rise by more than 4C. Large parts of Africa, Australia, the United States, South America, and Asia will become uninhabitable. The U.N.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a very conservative group, and considers only the most recent, inarguable research. They state that if we ac ...more

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Feb 22, 2021 Dr. Appu Sasidharan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Summary (Regular Review)

Due to the recent climatic changes that the world has witnessed, including the Texas storm, California wildfires and glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) in Uttarakhand, we can clearly say that Michael Crichton was 100% wrong about what he mentioned in his novel State of Fear that global warming is a hoax. This is a book that tells us about the effects of global warming and its consequences. It will be terrifying to read what awaits us in the future if we continue ...more

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Dec 28, 2018 David Wineberg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The Uninhabitable Earth is not just depressing, David Wallace-Wells’ book is a merciless hammering of the reader, a bludgeoning to wake up to the horrors of climate change. It is both hard and unpleasant to read. Two-thirds through, Wallace unexpectedly pauses to say “If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader.”

The structure is simple enough. Wallace divides the planet into 12 plagues. Every paragraph is jammed with facts and citations relating to that aspect. The 12 are: Heat Death, H ...more

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Jun 16, 2019 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: lor-2019, 5000-2019

In no uncertain terms, the author lays out chapter by chapter the damage we in a short period of time, have done to our planet. Damage that is almost certainly irreversible unless some drastic measures are taken, and taken now. From super stroke, to the increased wild fires, flooding in so many areas, all that we have seen with our own eyes. The carbon being released into our atmosphere is at detrimental levels, life in the near future will be unsustainable in many regions causing more and more ...more

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Feb 15, 2019 William rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: extraordinary-books

My rating: One Million Stars...

It is completely unavoidable now:
The frying of the planet until the collapse of civilisation, and then 100,000 years to recover.

Page 1 -
"It is worse, much worse than you think.

"The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matt ...more

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Apr 29, 2019 Jenna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Jenna by: Radiantflux

Shelves: non-fiction, science, environmentalism

"If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment—collectively walking down a path of suicide."

This book is terrifying but informative. It is terrifying because it is informative. David Wallace-Wells presents us with the cold, hard facts about global warming. Right now, we are only about 1° C warming but are on a course to warm much, much more. We are already witnessing the devastating effects of climate change, even at this relatively small amount of warming. Wildfires and droughts, mudslides and floods, hurricanes, tornados and cyclones, heat waves.... Every year these weather events get more extreme, and more lives are lost. This is not an enjoyable book to read, nor is it easy. It is, however, a book that I think every citizen of Planet Earth needs to read. "Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it. But you are not merely considering it; you are about to embark on living it. In many cases, in many places, we already are."

The author shows just how much damage is already unfolding, and shares the predictions of top climate scientists, from such scientists as those of the United Nations and the US military. He discusses the effects we can expect to suffer with each degree of warming the planet endures. This will not make you sleep easy at night. This is the stuff of nightmares. However, burying our head in the sand and pretending it's not so is not an option. It is also, as Mr. Wallace-Wells points out, delusional to expect technology to save us from the effects of global warming. This will almost certainly not be the case. "We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it." However, we should, we MUST, invest in research to do what we can to lessen the effects -- from carbon capture to creating water from atoms, from vertical gardening to growing meat in a lab (which most meat eaters I've spoken with think is gross but instead would rather eat the flesh of a living being that suffered horrendously for someone to drink a glass of milk or eat a burger -- not to mention what the livestock industry does to our environment and thus hastens global warming). We must do everything in our power to switch to clean, renewable energy and we must do it quickly. This will not reverse the damage that has already taken place and the planet will continue to warm even if we stopped all carbon output today. However, the longer we take to make these changes, the worse we can expect things to be.

My only complaint is that Mr. Wallace-Wells at times belittles personal responsibility, effort, and choices to have less of a carbon footprint. It's almost as though he's saying, Go ahead and drive that gas-guzzler, eat that meat, run your AC even when you're not home because, hey! If governments aren't going to tackle the problem and move to renewable and clean energy, we're fucked anyway! I think that is the wrong attitude to have. Certainly we need to raise our voices and demand our governments step in and do something but at the same time, we each of us should do what we can to lessen the amount of carbon and methane we put into the air. How can we demand the governments of the world do something about climate change if we're not willing to make any changes in our own lives?

The author does offer some hope and possible solutions in the last part of the book. I personally do not feel much optimism but I do tend to lean towards pessimistic thoughts (well, others say that; I say I'm realistic!). I hope I am wrong. We do have the tools we need: ..."a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture." . Let's force our governments to take climate change seriously and act to do something about it. Let's take responsibility and save humanity and other animals from the worst that global warming can inflict upon us. ...more

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Jul 09, 2019 Dave Schaafsma rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-loved-2019, environment, non-fiction

"It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

That is the first line of this book, which I think is the key book for all of us to to read and read now about the dangers we now face within decades, not centuries, (or what we are already beginning to experience in a very real way) but if you think it and its title are hyperbolic, read the first half of the book as soon as possible and (with science) deny if you can the facts I read there, most of them familiar to those who have been reading the envir ...more

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Aug 02, 2019 Jessaka rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ecology

First he Roar, Then the Silence

“When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.”

~~Cree Indian prophecy

“God will bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

~~ Revelation 11:18

In 1957, my 8th grade teacher gave us a lesson on pollution and its effects on our planet. I don’t recall much of what he had said other than he had brought the book, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson to class and discussed it that day. I only recall th ...more

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Apr 04, 2019 Michael Ferro rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

It is no secret that the human race is hellbent on destroying itself; we invite our own person apocalypse every day that we sit and do nothing. But just how hard will it be for humans to change their ways? What does the future hold in store on this rapidly warming planet if we don't change? What if we DO change—will it matter? Or have too many red lines been crossed.

Though thoroughly depressing, this book is one of the most level-headed, well-balanced books I've read on the impending doom known ...more

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Feb 13, 2020 Alice Lippart rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2020, non-fiction, science

Alarming and very difficult to take in, but important.

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Sep 20, 2020 Leonie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

mandatory reading

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Mar 09, 2019 Kaelan Ratcliffe ▪ كايِلان راتكِليف rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: culture-cultural-studies, environment, politics, the-issues-of-our-time, activism, classic, capitalism, civilisation-critique-of, horror, favorites

The End
Its time for all of us to stop playing games.

This book is a cascade of anxiety inducing, despair-magnifying horror. I had an minor anxiety attack on the thirteenth page. Even Wallace-Wells (the author) commends his readers for reaching a certain stage within his extended essays* pages.

I've managed to desensitise myself to many ecological / climate change based articles, books, and journals so that I may educate myself on the topic. I erected barriers in my mind, so that I might hand The End
Its time for all of us to stop playing games.

This book is a cascade of anxiety inducing, despair-magnifying horror. I had an minor anxiety attack on the thirteenth page. Even Wallace-Wells (the author) commends his readers for reaching a certain stage within his extended essays* pages.

I've managed to desensitise myself to many ecological / climate change based articles, books, and journals so that I may educate myself on the topic. I erected barriers in my mind, so that I might handle the truth scientists stare at daily when analysing the state of the planet. However, The Uninhabitable Earth utterly vaporised those barriers into a pathetic nothingness. Wallace Wells completely gives up playing around in this text: we're on our way out if we don't stop what's happening within a decade (at maximum). We have already baked enough carbon into the system that a two degree heating up of the plant is almost certain. As such, Mr. Wells lays out, simply, clearly, exactly what we can expect from that 2 degrees. If we persue it further, a three, four and five degree increase in temperature will compound our suffering immensely (words really don't do justice to carnage the earth will wreak at a stage such as this).

The result is utterly soul destroying.

The massive body of information from decades of climate research he has collected is an amalgamation of irrefutable evidence that shows if we don't act, we are in store for what can only be described as Hell on Earth.

As such, we have no choice but to take action. The environmental movement extinction rebellion is planning a huge protest of disruption on April 15th 2019 to force governments to act; I will be attending. I would advise planning local action of your own. We're out of time.

This work is the literary access we have been given to stare into the human species collective soul. I am not engaging in dramatic flare when I say this book is an initiation. Every single one of us must read this book first before EVEN SAYING A SINGLE WORD about how we plan to individually deal mentally, and physically with climate change. As far as I'm concerned, you, me, and everyone on this earth has no right to even comment on this until they actual read what we're in store for (go for other books if not this one, whatever is required; read it).

My conclusion: this book more requires action, less analysis. Our time is up.

* This book originally appeared as an essay in the New Yorker 2018. ...more

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Dec 29, 2020 ALet rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2020

It is really important book, that covers a lot of aspects of climate change.

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May 14, 2019 Libby rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: environmental, published-in-2019, non-fiction, read-in-2019

David Wallace-Wells is a journalist who’s written articles for New York Magazine and The Guardian. This is his first book, which he admits that people, upon reading, may call alarmist, which would be okay with him because, he states, “I am alarmed.” With an array of scientific resources, Wallace paints a bleak landscape for humanity’s future if no changes are made in our use of fossil fuels. Wallace does not go down the path of Guy McPherson, who consistently predicts near-term human extinction. David Wallace-Wells is a journalist who’s written articles for New York Magazine and The Guardian. This is his first book, which he admits that people, upon reading, may call alarmist, which would be okay with him because, he states, “I am alarmed.” With an array of scientific resources, Wallace paints a bleak landscape for humanity’s future if no changes are made in our use of fossil fuels. Wallace does not go down the path of Guy McPherson, who consistently predicts near-term human extinction. In fact, Wallace labels McPherson as a fringe element. However, Wallace readily admits that we’re just at the beginning of what will soon look much worse.

Pg 34. “Annihilation is only the very thin tail of warming’s very long bell curve, and there is nothing stopping us from steering clear of it. But what lies between us and extinction is horrifying enough, and we have not yet begun to contemplate what it means to live under those conditions--what it will do to our politics and our culture and our emotional equilibria, our sense of history and our relationship to it, our sense of nature and our relationship to it, that we are living in a world degraded by our own hands, with the horizon of human possibility dramatically dimmed.”

In Part II, Wallace extrapolates what the future could look like under chapter headings of Heat Death, Hunger, Drowning, Wildfire, Diasters No Longer Natural, Freshwater Drain, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air, Plagues of Warming, Economic Collapse, Climate Conflict, and a chapter he entitles, “Systems.” Wallace gives data, statistics, facts, all supported by scientific research. The notes in the back of the book (65 pages of them) align his sources with the page number on which they are presented, a much-appreciated effort that allowed me to run my own credibility checks. The information that Wallace dispenses is not easy to read. It took me a few weeks to read this relatively short book, one, because it is dense with facts, two, because emotionally and mentally, I needed breaks. He explains that we have already left behind the environmental conditions under which human life evolved, and poses the question, “What will it mean to live outside that window, probably quite far outside it?”

In Part III, Wallace discusses the stories we tell about climate change, our apocalyptic literature and movies. He also discusses how we may rationalize our thinking about climate change, will technology save us, and political ideologies, as well as our narratives of progress. This is a serious and comprehensive work related to climate science as it is known in 2019.

I’ll share a couple of Wallace’s notes:
Shows how the earth’s temperatures have changed over the last 20,000 years.
https://xkcd.com/1732/

2. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 2018 report
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

But here is a link to a site that is more concise and gives six takeaways from the IPCC report.
http://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2018/... ...more

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Aug 30, 2020 Max rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science

Wallace-Wells paints a bleak picture of our future if climate change isn’t addressed seriously and soon. He lays out a zodiac comprised of twelve “elements of chaos” delineating the many ways we will suffer. They range from flooding, heat waves, monster storms, and drought to ruined agriculture, shattered economies, dislocation of hundreds of millions of people, and wars. He questions our ability to respond. In the U. S. we have a climate denier as president who dismisses climate change as a hoa Wallace-Wells paints a bleak picture of our future if climate change isn’t addressed seriously and soon. He lays out a zodiac comprised of twelve “elements of chaos” delineating the many ways we will suffer. They range from flooding, heat waves, monster storms, and drought to ruined agriculture, shattered economies, dislocation of hundreds of millions of people, and wars. He questions our ability to respond. In the U. S. we have a climate denier as president who dismisses climate change as a hoax. The leaders of most of the countries of the world pay lip service to confronting climate change but at best make marginal efforts to do so. So every day our situation grows more dire. Severe consequences are already baked in. Action now is about preventing catastrophic change.

Having already read enough similar descriptions of the future, the most disturbing part of the book to me was Wallace-Wells take on human psychology. Humans don’t have a good record facing future threats where the severity of the outcome is not readily apparent. People not only deny and minimize, they foster unrealistic optimism about our ability to fix the problem once it is upon us, and many just don’t want to think about it. Even when we experience more severe consequences we will still have the same ideological divide among the world’s people. Cooperation will still be difficult. Some will embrace science, but others will adopt conspiracy theories and many will see it as part of God’s plan.

Wallace-Wells is ringing the alarm for us to take action, but this is not a hopeful book. I completely agree with his message, though I wasn’t crazy about the style. He quickly jumped from one idea or fact to another layering a lot of worst case scenarios on top of more widely accepted ones. I didn’t feel this was necessary to make his point and felt it diminished the strength of his argument. However I take the threat of climate change every bit as seriously as he does and if this works to get the message out I am all for it.
...more

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Mar 16, 2019 xtine rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: climate

Covers similar ground as Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, but with less depth & specificity and zero action plan.

In spite of pooh-poohing everything from individual lifestyle choices to climate-first candidates, with a ton of what-about-isms, Wallace-Wells ends on an optimistic note — based on what, he does not say.

I recommend Klein’s book instead of this one — or in addition to this, especially for those this left feeling nihilistic and hopeless.

This Changes Everything Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

...more

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Jul 13, 2019 Kathleen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Dystopian science fiction is more uplifting than Wallace-Wells excellent book outlining just how dire the future is for humans on our beautiful planet. We are rapidly destroying our precious ecosystems by adding more and more carbon to the atmosphere. Wallace-Wells warns of collapsing ice sheets, water scarcity, droughts, and fires that result in a decrease of arable land, and rising sea levels.

The solution is for the entire globe to reduce its carbon footprint with revolutionary zeal. It would ...more

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Apr 17, 2019 Mara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: audio, physical-owned, favorites, subscription, recommended-to-me

A book that truly changed the way I look at the world -- it is sending me down an entire rabbit hole of learning more about climate change and what I can do to be a part of collective action. I especially appreciate the anthropocentric approach to Wallace-Wells argument, as I think that connected with me on a deeper level than some of the more romantic arguments about the purity of nature. Don't get me wrong, I love nature & I get that those arguments have their place, but those arguments connec ...more

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Apr 01, 2019 Max rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: climate, book-club, abandoned, we-re-screwed

I made it to roughly page 50 before the urge to give up overpowered anything else. This is a shockingly bad book, especially given how necessary its warnings are. Every sentence is unnecessarily convoluted; every paragraph is more disjointed and baffling than the next. It's virtually impossible to learn anything because wading through the prose and the useless asides takes so much effort. This is a total waste. Put it aside and wait until someone else writes the book this should have been. ...more

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Mar 30, 2019 Malia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, best-of-2019

This is a must-read! The book rattled me (how could it be any other way with a title like Uninhabitable Earth), but maybe that's important given the current situation. I need to think about this for a while longer before I can write a better review, but I certainly recommend it!

Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com ...more

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Nov 04, 2019 Steve rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Review supplement: I recommend this book strongly (more on that below), but (1) if you've read it and enjoyed it; or (2) if the book is daunting and you'd prefer to dip your toe in the water with a pocket-sized novella that's serious-as-can-be but packaged as speculative fiction, I strongly recommend Oreskes & Conway's The Collapse of Western Civilization. I found Collapse particularly gratifying (and frightening) as a companion/supplement to this (and a number of others)....

- - - [Original revi ...more

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Feb 16, 2020 Henk rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

The mind boggling, all encompassing impact of a few degrees change in temperature terrifyingly captured - 3,5 stars rounded up
It has become commonplace among climate activists to say that we have, today, all the tools we need to avoid catastrophic climate change—even major climate change. It is also true. But political will is not some trivial ingredient, always at hand. We have the tools we need to solve global poverty, epidemic disease, and abuse of women, as well.

The four horsemen of the apoc ...more

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About David Wallace-Wells

David Wallace-Wells

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David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.

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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

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“It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.” — 23 likes

“In fact, the belief that climate could be plausibly governed, or managed, by any institution or human instrument presently at hand is another wide-eyed climate delusion. The planet survived many millennia without anything approaching a world government, in fact endured nearly the entire span of human civilization that way, organized into competitive tribes and fiefdoms and kingdoms and nation-states, and only began to build something resembling a cooperative blueprint, very piecemeal, after brutal world wars—in the form of the League of Nations and United Nations and European Union and even the market fabric of globalization, whatever its flaws still a vision of cross-national participation, imbued with the neoliberal ethos that life on Earth was a positive-sum game. If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.” — 16 likes

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