The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

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.

more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.

The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since the end of World War II, the figure is about 85 percent.

Which means that, if the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation, too. We all also know that second lifetime. It is ours.

Beginning in 2011, about one million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought—and in a very real sense, much of the “populist moment” the entire West is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants.

The U.N. projections are bleaker: 200 million climate refugees by 2050.

This is part of what makes climate change what the theorist Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”—a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended.

The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again. We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead. And the climate system we have been observing for the last several years, the one that has battered the planet again and again, is not our bleak future in preview. It would be more precise to say that it is a product of our recent climate past, already passing behind us into a dustbin of environmental nostalgia. There is no longer any such thing as a “natural disaster,” but not only will things get worse; technically speaking, they have already gotten worse. Even if, miraculously, humans immediately ceased emitting carbon, we’d still be due for some additional warming from just the stuff we’ve put into the air already. And of course, with global emissions still increasing, we’re very far from zeroing out on carbon, and therefore very far from stalling climate change. The devastation we are now seeing all around us is a beyond-best-case scenario for the future of warming and all the climate disasters it will bring.

But it also isn’t necessary for Westerners to adopt the lifestyle of the global poor. Seventy percent of the energy produced by the planet, it’s estimated, is lost as waste heat. If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half. If the world’s richest 10 percent were limited to that same footprint, global emissions would fall by a third. And why shouldn’t they be? Almost as a prophylactic against climate guilt, as the news from science has grown bleaker, Western liberals have comforted themselves by contorting their own consumption patterns into performances of moral or environmental purity—less beef, more Teslas, fewer transatlantic flights. But the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics. America’s rump climate party aside, that scaling should not be impossible, once we understand the stakes. In fact, the stakes mean, it must not be.

if a best-case scenario is now somewhere north of 2 degrees of warming by 2100, it seems that the likeliest outcome, the fattest part of the bell curve of probability, sits between 2.5 and 3 degrees, or just a bit above. Probably even that amount of warming would require significant negative-emissions use, given that our use of carbon is still growing. And there is also some risk from scientific uncertainty, the possibility that we are underestimating the effects of those feedback loops in natural systems we only poorly understand. Conceivably, if those processes are triggered, we could hit 4 degrees of warming by 2100, even with a meaningful reduction in emissions over the coming decades. But the track record since Kyoto implies that human shortsightedness makes it unproductive to offer predictions about what will happen, when it comes to emissions and warming; better to consider what could happen. The sky is literally the limit.

conducted. In this way, climate change appears to be not merely one challenge among many facing a planet already struggling with civil strife and war and horrifying inequality and far too many other insoluble hardships to iterate, but the all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met—a whole sphere, in other words, which literally contains within it all of the world’s future problems and all of its possible solutions.

Already, 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;

“Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say,” he writes. “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”

Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.

well. In 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that nearly 311,000 homes in the United States would be at risk of chronic inundation by 2045—a timespan, as they pointed out, no longer than a mortgage. By 2100, the number would be more than 2.4 million properties, or $1 trillion worth of American real estate—underwater.

London. The United States is an unexceptional example: at just 170 feet, more than 97 percent of Florida would disappear, leaving only a few hills in the Panhandle; and just under 97 percent of Delaware would be submerged. Oceans would cover 80 percent of Louisiana, 70 percent of New Jersey, and half of South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Maryland. San Francisco and Sacramento would be underwater, as would New York City, Philadelphia, Providence, Houston, Seattle, and Virginia Beach, among dozens of other cities. In many places, the coast would retreat by as much as one hundred miles. Arkansas and Vermont, landlocked today, would become coastal.

The effects of these fires are not linear or neatly additive. It might be more accurate to say that they initiate a new set of biological cycles. Scientists warn that, even as California is baked into brush by a drier future, making inevitable more and more damaging fires, the probability of unprecedented-seeming rainfalls will grow, too—as much as a threefold increase of events like that which produced the state’s Great Flood of 1862.

The phrase “500-year storm” is also very helpful on the question of resilience. Even a devastated community, buckled in suffering, can endure a long period of recovery if it is wealthy and politically stable and needs to rebuild only once a century—perhaps even once every fifty years. But rebuilding for a decade in the wake of spectacular storms that hit once a decade, or once every two decades, is an entirely different matter, even for countries as rich as the United States and regions as well-off as greater Houston. New Orleans is still reeling from Katrina, a dozen years on, with the Lower Ninth Ward barely one-third as populated as it was before the storm. And it surely doesn’t help that the entire coastline of Louisiana is being swallowed by the sea, with 2,000 square miles already gone. The state loses a football field of land every single hour. In the Florida Keys, 150 miles of road need to be raised to stay ahead of sea level, costing as much as $7 million each mile, or up to $1 billion, total. The county’s 2018 road budget was $25 million.

In the last hundred years, many of the planet’s largest lakes have begun drying up, from the Aral Sea in central Asia, which was once the world’s fourth largest and which has lost more than 90 percent of its volume in recent decades, to Lake Mead, which supplies much of Las Vegas’s water and has lost as much as 400 billion gallons in a single year. Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second biggest, has completely disappeared; Iran’s Lake Urmia has shrunk more than 80 percent in thirty years. Lake Chad has more or less evaporated entirely. Climate change is only one factor in this story, but its impact is not going to shrink over time.

It has become quite common to say that we are living through a mass extinction—a period in which human activity has multiplied the rate at which species are disappearing from the earth by a factor perhaps as large as a thousand. It is probably also fair to call this an era marked by what is called ocean anoxification. Over the past fifty years, the amount of ocean water with no oxygen at all has quadrupled globally, giving us a total of more than four hundred “dead zones”; oxygen-deprived zones have grown by several million square kilometers, roughly the size of all of Europe; and hundreds of coastal cities now sit on fetid, under-oxygenated ocean.

This is partly due to the simple warming of the planet, since warmer waters can carry less oxygen.

Our lungs need oxygen, but it is only a fraction of what we breathe, and the fraction tends to decline the more carbon is in the atmosphere. That doesn’t mean we are at risk of suffocation—oxygen is far too abundant for that—but we will nevertheless suffer. With CO2 at 930 parts per million (more than double where we are today), cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.

But carbon is, more or less, the least of it. Going forward, the planet’s air won’t just be warmer; it will likely also be dirtier, more oppressive, and more sickening. Droughts have a direct impact on air quality, producing what is now known as dust exposure and in the days of the American Dust Bowl was called “dust pneumonia”; climate change will bring new dust storms to those plains states, where deaths from dust pollution are expected to more than double and hospitalizations to triple. The hotter the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by the middle of this century Americans should suffer a 70 percent increase in days with unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By the 2090s, depending on what pollution path we take, as many as 2 billion people globally could be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level. Already, more than 10,000 people die from air pollution daily. That is considerably more each day—each day—than the total number of people who have ever been affected by the meltdowns of nuclear reactors.

We can breathe in microplastics, even when indoors, where they’ve been detected suspended in the air, and do already drink them: they are found in the tap water of 94 percent of all tested American cities. And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

Yellow fever is just one of the plagues that will be carried by mosquitoes as they migrate, conquering more and more of a warming world—the globalization of pandemic disease. Malaria alone kills a million people each year already, infecting many more, but you don’t worry much about it if you are living in Maine or France. As the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you may; over the course of the next century, more and more of the world’s population will be living under the shadow of diseases like these. You didn’t much worry about Zika before a couple of years ago, either.

But in 2018, Burke and several other colleagues published a major paper exploring the growth consequences of some scenarios closer to our present predicament. In it, they considered one plausible but still quite optimistic scenario, in which the world meets its Paris Agreement commitments, limiting warming to between 2.5 and 3 degrees. This is probably about the best-case warming scenario we might reasonably expect; globally, relative to a world with no additional warming, it would cut per-capita economic output by the end of the century, Burke and his colleagues estimate, by between 15 and 25 percent. Hitting four degrees of warming, which lies on the low end of the range of warming implied by our current emissions trajectory, would cut into it by 30 percent or more. This is a trough twice as deep as the deprivations that scarred our grandparents in the 1930s, and which helped produce a wave of fascism, authoritarianism, and genocide. But you can only really call it a trough when you climb out of it and look back from a new peak, relieved. There may not be any such relief or reprieve from climate deprivation, and though, as in any collapse, there will be those few who find ways to benefit, the experience of most may be more like that of miners buried permanently at the bottom of a shaft.

But for the military, climate change is not just a matter of great-power rivalry executed across a transformed map. Even for those in the American military who expect the country’s hegemony to endure indefinitely, climate change presents a problem, because being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. And it’s not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming—a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began to accelerate when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil. From Boko Haram to ISIS to the Taliban and militant Islamic groups in Pakistan, drought and crop failure have been linked to radicalization, and the effect may be especially pronounced amid ethnic strife: from 1980 to 2010, a 2016 study found, 23 percent of conflict in the world’s ethnically diverse countries began in months stamped by weather disaster. According to one assessment, thirty-two countries—from Haiti to the Philippines and India to Cambodia, each heavily dependent on farming and agriculture—face “extreme risk” of conflict and civil unrest from climate disruptions over the next thirty years.

The country was founded on genocidal indifference to the native landscape and those who inhabited it, and its modern ambitions have always been precarious: Australia is today a society of expansive abundance, jerry-rigged onto a very harsh and ecologically unforgiving land. In 2011, a single heat wave there produced significant tree dieback and coral bleaching, the death of plant life, crashes in local bird populations and dramatic spikes in the number of certain insects, and transformations of ecosystems both marine and terrestrial. When the country enacted a carbon tax, its emissions fell; when, under political pressure, the tax was repealed, they rose again. In 2018, the country’s parliament declared global warming a “current and existential national security risk.” A few months later, its climate-conscious prime minister was forced to resign, for the shame of attempting to honor the Paris accords.

When it comes to climate parables, we tend to like best the ones starring animals, who are mute when we do not project our voices onto them, and who are dying, at our own hands—half of them extinct, E. O. Wilson estimates, by 2100. Even as we face crippling impacts from climate on human life, we still look to those animals, in part because what John Ruskin memorably called the “pathetic fallacy” still holds: it can be curiously easier to empathize with them, perhaps because we would rather not reckon with our own responsibility, but instead simply feel their pain, at least briefly. In the face of a storm kicked up by humans, and which we continue to kick up each day, we seem most comfortable adopting a learned posture of powerlessness.

Eating organic is nice, in other words, but if your goal is to save the climate your vote is much more important. Politics is a moral multiplier. And a perception of worldly sickness uncomplemented by political commitment gives us only “wellness.”

The threat from climate change is more total than from the bomb. It is also more pervasive. In a 2018 paper, forty-two scientists from around the world warned that, in an unabated-emissions scenario, no ecosystem on Earth was safe, with transformation “ubiquitous and dramatic,” exceeding in just one or two centuries the amount of change that unfolded in the most dramatic periods of transformation in the earth’s history over tens of thousands of years. Half of the Great Barrier Reef has already died, methane is leaking from Arctic permafrost that may never freeze again, and the high-end estimates for what warming will mean for cereal crops suggest that just four degrees of warming could reduce yields by 50 percent. If this strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: 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.