The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

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.

in fact find it offensive to women and people of color that all of a sudden there’s talk of extending human-rights-like legal protections to chimps, apes, and octopuses, just a generation or two after we finally broke the white-male monopoly on legal personhood.

Should we sloa down? Delay recognizing the moral worth of non human animals?

At two degrees, the ice sheets will begin their collapse, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. There would be thirty-two times as many extreme heat waves in India, and each would last five times as long, exposing ninety-three times more people. This is our best-case scenario.

At three degrees, southern Europe would be in permanent drought, and the average drought in Central America would last nineteen months longer and in the Caribbean twenty-one months longer. In northern Africa, the figure is sixty months longer—five years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the Mediterranean and sextuple, or more, in the United States.

At four degrees, there would be eight million more cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone and close to annual global food crises. There could be 9 percent more heat-related deaths. Damages from river flooding would grow thirtyfold in Bangladesh, twentyfold in India, and as much as sixtyfold in the United Kingdom. In certain places, six climate-driven natural disasters could strike simultaneously, and, globally, damages co...

130 feet of sea-level rise, enough to draw a new American coastline as far west as I-95.

consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.

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. —

the story of Atlantis, having endured and enchanted for several millennia, will compete with the real-time sagas of the Marshall Islands and Miami Beach,

the strange fantasy of Santa and his polar workshop will grow eerier still in an Arctic of ice-free summers;

The imperious West has spent five centuries looking down its nose at the plight of those living within the pale of tropical disease, and one wonders how that will change when mosquitoes carrying malaria and dengue are flying through the streets of Copenhagen and Chicago, too.

150 million more people would die from air pollution alone in a 2-degree warmer world than in a 1.5-degree warmer one. Later that year, the IPCC raised the stakes further: in the gap between 1.5 degrees and 2, it said, hundreds of millions of lives were at stake.

Americans waste a quarter of their food, which means that the carbon footprint of the average meal is a third larger than it has to be.

How was this calculated? What is the math behind this?

the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics.

At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem. And the effect would be fast: after a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.

At eleven or twelve degrees Celsius of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat.

all occurred since 2002, and eventually, the

As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for many of the two million Muslims who currently make the pilgrimage each year.

global food production accounts for about a third of all emissions.

To avoid dangerous climate change, Greenpeace has estimated that the world needs to cut its meat and dairy consumption in half by 2050;

A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.

“Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all.”

--William Vollmann Carbon Ideologies

By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American Dust Bowl ever was.

never in the earth’s entire recorded history has there been warming at anything like this speed—by one estimate, around ten times faster than at any point in the last 66 million years. Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of

The last time the earth was four degrees warmer, as Peter Brannen has written, there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher. There were palm trees in the Arctic.

More than 600 million people live within thirty feet of sea level today.

It was the deadliest fire in California history, a record that had been set almost a century before, by the Griffith Park Fire of 1933.

And after that came the Camp Fire!

A paradise dreamscape erected in a barren desert, L.A. has always been an impossible city, as Mike Davis has so brilliantly written.

that January,

In 1862?

the effect of wildfires on emissions is among the most feared climate feedback loops—that

the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year.

This means that this one policy would have between two and three times the annual carbon impact of the entire American economy,

Well. You're comparing 9 years to 1 year.

vector proliferation”—when the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in.

Remember Hurricane Sandy? By 2100, floods of that scale could arrive seventeen times more often in New York. Katrina-level hurricanes are expected to double in frequency. Looking globally, researchers have found an increase of 25 to 30 percent in Category 4 and 5 hurricanes for just one degree Celsius of global warming.

paving over stretches of vulnerable coast, as we’ve done most conspicuously in Houston and New Orleans, stops up natural drainage systems with concrete that extends each epic flood.

Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second biggest, has completely disappeared;

In the meantime, they’re fracking in that drinking water.

Disputed. Not how it is supposed to work.

anoxification.

We have a word for that. Deoxygenation

Over the past fifty years, the amount of ocean water with no oxygen at all has quadrupled globally,

Oxygen is a constituet coponent of water. But ylu mean oxygen deprived

A shutdown of the conveyor belt is not a scenario that any credible scientists worry about on any human timescale. But a slowdown is another matter.

There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years—in

In New England, dead moose calves have been found suckling as many as 90,000 engorged ticks,

What? I think you have that backwards

By comparison, the Great Depression dropped global GDP by about 15 percent, it is estimated—the

in a short period of time

(Every round-trip plane ticket from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.)

the U.S. is more vulnerable to climate impacts than any country in the world but India,

That's questionable. Kiribati Is going to sink. Large parts of se asia are going to disappear.

like radio signals beamed out from a whole global forest of towers, each transmitting economic suffering.

Wtf?

wars are not caused by climate change only in the same way that hurricanes are not caused by climate change,

we didn’t defeat the environment at all. There was no final conquest, no dominion established. In fact, the opposite: Whatever it means for the other animals on the planet, with global warming we have unwittingly claimed ownership of a system beyond our ability to control or tame

Scientists spent decades presenting the unambiguous data, demonstrating to anyone who would listen just what kind of crisis will come for the planet if nothing is done, and then watched, year after year, as nothing was done.

To the extent that we tend to believe today in human resiliency against such disasters, it is a legacy of several hundred years of industrial affluence produced by our exploitation of fossil fuels.