The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

In just the last forty years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half of the world’s vertebrate animals have died; in just the last twenty-five, one study of German nature preserves found, the flying insect population declined by three-quarters.

Climate change could soon mean that, in the fall, trees may simply turn brown, and so we will look differently at entire schools of painting, which stretched for generations, devoted to best capturing the oranges and reds we can no longer see ourselves out the windows of our cars as we drive along our highways.

The force of retribution will cascade down to us through nature, but the cost to nature is only one part of the story; we will all be hurting. I may be in the minority in feeling that the world could lose much of what we think of as “nature,” as far as I cared, so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind. The problem is, we can’t.

every uninhabitable planet out there is a reminder of just how unique a set of circumstances is required to produce a climate equilibrium supportive of life. No intelligent life that we know of ever evolved, anywhere in the universe, outside of the narrow Goldilocks range of temperatures that enclosed all of human evolution, and that we have now left behind, probably permanently.

“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.”

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.

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. Better not to think what that means for life at the equator.

In 2017, it was revealed that two glaciers in the East Antarctic sheet were also losing ice at an alarming rate—eighteen billion tons of ice each year, enough to cover New Jersey in three feet of ice. If both glaciers go, scientists expect, ultimately, an additional 16 feet of water. In total, the two Antarctic ice sheets could raise sea level by 200 feet; in many parts of the world, the shoreline would move by many miles.

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 rest of the world may fare even worse. Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian Amazon, would not just be on the oceanfront, but underneath its waters, as would Buenos Aires and the biggest city in landlocked Paraguay, Asunción, now more than five hundred miles inland. In Europe, in addition to London, Dublin would be underwater, as would Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Stockholm, Riga and Helsinki and Saint Petersburg. Istanbul would flood, and the Black Sea and the Mediterranean would join. In Asia, you could forget the coastline cities of Doha and Dubai and Karachi and Kolkata and Mumbai (to name just a few) and would be able to trace the trail of underwater metropolises from what is now close to desert, in Baghdad, all the way to Beijing, itself a hundred miles inland.

Two hundred and sixty feet is, ultimately, the ceiling—but it is a pretty good bet that without some incomprehensibly large ocean engineering project to forestall the rise we will get there eventually.

Greenhouse gases simply work on too long a timescale to avoid it, though what kind of human civilization will be around to see that flooded planet is very much to be determined. Of course, the scariest variable is how quickly that flood will come. Perhaps it will be a thousand years, but perhaps much sooner. More than 600 million people live within thirty feet of sea level today.

“Since 1919, when the county began keeping records of its fires, some areas have burned eight times.”

L.A.

Five of the twenty worst fires in California history hit the state in the fall of 2017, a year in which over nine thousand separate ones broke out, burning through more than 1,240,000 acres—nearly two thousand square miles made soot.

That October, in Northern California, 172 fires broke out in just two days—devastation

2017

Then, in November, came the Woolsey Fire, which forced the evacuation of 170,000, and the Camp Fire, which was somehow worse, burning through more than 200 square miles and incinerating an entire town so quickly that the evacuees, 50,000 of them, found themselves sprinting past exploding cars, their sneakers melting to the asphalt as they ran. 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.

When trees die—by natural processes, by fire, at the hands of humans—they release into the atmosphere the carbon stored within them, sometimes for as long as centuries. In this way, they are like coal. Which is why the effect of wildfires on emissions is among the most feared climate feedback loops—that the world’s forests, which have typically been carbon sinks, would become carbon sources, unleashing all that stored gas.

At present, the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year. But in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil promising to open the rain forest to development—which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? A group of Brazilian scientists has estimated that between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release the equivalent of 13.12 gigatons of carbon.

Last year, the United States emitted about 5 gigatons. This means that this one policy would have between two and three times the annual carbon impact of the entire American economy, with all of its airplanes and automobiles and coal plants.

Historically, the emissions rate from deforestation was even higher, with the clearing of woods and flattening of forests causing 30 percent of emissions from 1861 to 2000; until 1980, deforestation played a greater role in increases of hottest-day records than did direct greenhouse-gas emissions. There is a public health impact as well: every square kilometer of deforestation produces twenty-seven additional cases of malaria, thanks to what is called “vector proliferation”—when the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in.

There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years—in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.

The Arctic also stores terrifying diseases from more recent times. In Alaska, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million, and killed as many as 50 million—about

Scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, among many other diseases that have otherwise passed into human legend—an abridged history of devastating sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.

in 2016, a boy was killed and twenty others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least seventy-five years earlier; more than two thousand present-day reindeer died.

In Brazil, for generations, yellow fever sat in the Amazon basin, where the Haemagogus and Sabethes mosquitoes thrived, making the disease a concern for those who lived, worked, or traveled deep into the jungle, but only for them; in 2016, it left the Amazon, as more and more mosquitoes fanned out of the rain forest; and by 2017 it had reached areas around the country’s megalopolises, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—more than thirty million people, many of them living in shantytowns, facing the arrival of a disease that kills between 3 and 8 percent of those infected.

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;

consider the case of the saiga—the adorable, dwarflike antelope, native to central Asia. In May 2015, nearly two-thirds of the global population died in the span of just days—every single saiga in an area the size of Florida, the land suddenly dotted with hundreds of thousands of saiga carcasses and not one lone survivor.

The culprit, it turned out, was a simple bacteria, Pasteurella multocida, which had lived inside the saiga’s tonsils, without threatening its host in any way, for many, many generations. Suddenly it had proliferated, emigrated to the bloodstream, and from there to the animals’ liver, kidneys, and spleen. Why? “The places where the saigas died in May 2015 were extremely warm and humid,” Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic. “In fact, humidity levels were the highest ever seen in the region since records began in 1948.”

“I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” Camille Parmesan, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, has said.

I have an emotional reaction to what's being lost and I'm just an average person. Can't imagine what it must be like for those in the trenches studying it and watching it happen.

Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild. We have simply crowded—or bullied, or brutalized—every other species into retreat, near-extinction, or worse. E. O. Wilson thinks the era might be better called the Eremocine—the age of loneliness.

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But the main lesson from the church of technology runs in the other direction, instructing us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to regard the world beyond our phones as less real, less urgent, and less meaningful than the worlds made available to us through those screens, which happen to be worlds protected from climate devastation. As Andreas Malm has wondered, “How many will play augmented reality games on a planet that is six degrees warmer?” The poet and musician Kate Tempest puts it more brinily: “Staring into the screen so we don’t have to see the planet die.”

It wasn’t just the promise of growth that was invented in the industrial era, but the idea of history, which promises that the past tells a story of human progress—and suggests, therefore, that the future will, too.

It’s like we’ve been given the keys to the planet. Now we’re ready to drive it off a cliff.”

“The earth will survive; it’s the humans that might not.”

George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier: The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

Adlai Stevenson - in an address before the United Nations Social and Economic Council in Geneva - 1965