The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

More than 140 million people in just three regions of the world will be made climate migrants by 2050, the World Bank projected in a 2018 study, assuming current warming and emissions trends: 86 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, and 17 million in Latin America. The most commonly cited estimate from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration suggests numbers a bit higher—200 million, total, by 2050. These figures are quite high—higher than most non-advocates credit. But according to the U.N. IOM, climate change may unleash as many as a billion migrants on the world by 2050.

An enormous study in Taiwan found that, for every single unit of additional air pollution, the relative risk of Alzheimer’s doubled. Similar patterns have been observed from Ontario to Mexico City.

if global warming continues on anything like its present track, it will come to shape everything we do on the planet, from agriculture to human migration to business and mental health, transforming not just our relationship to nature but to politics and to history, and proving a knowledge system as total as “modernity.”