The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Which suggests that we might better conceive of history not as a deliberate procession of years marching forward on a timeline but as an expanding balloon of population growth, humanity dilating across the planet almost to the point of full eclipse.

Even if we pull the planet up short of two degrees by 2100, we will be left with an atmosphere that contains 500 parts per million of carbon—perhaps more. The last time that was the case, sixteen million years ago, the planet was not two degrees warmer; it was somewhere between five and eight, giving the planet about 130 feet of sea-level rise, enough to draw a new American coastline as far west as I-95. Some of these processes take thousands of years to unfold, but they are also irreversible, and therefore effectively permanent. You might hope to simply reverse climate change; you can’t. It will outrun all of us.