The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

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.