The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime—the planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral.

guilt saturates the planet’s air as much as carbon, though we choose to believe we do not breathe it.

the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation, too. We all also know that second lifetime. It is ours.

the high end of what’s possible in the next thirty years, the United Nations says, is even worse: “a billion or more vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.” A billion or more.

High-end estimates establish the boundaries of what’s possible, between which we can better conceive of what is likely.

You might hope to simply reverse climate change; you can’t. It will outrun all of us.

But time is perhaps the most mind-bending feature, the worst outcomes arriving so long from now that we reflexively discount their reality.

And so, in a convenient cognitive bargain, we have chosen to consider climate change only as it will present itself this century.

There is nothing stopping us from three degrees other than our own will to change course, which we have yet to display.

Whatever we do to stop warming, and however aggressively we act to protect ourselves from its ravages, we will have pulled the devastation of human life on Earth into view—close enough that we can see clearly what it would look like and know, with some degree of precision, how it will punish our children and grandchildren. Close enough, in fact, that we are already beginning to feel its effects ourselves, when we do not turn away.

But global warming is not “yes” or “no,” nor is it “today’s weather forever” or “doomsday tomorrow.” It is a function that gets worse over time as long as we continue to produce greenhouse gas.

Global warming isn’t a perpetrator; it’s a conspiracy. We all live within climate and within all the changes we have produced in it, which enclose us all and everything we do.

Climate change isn’t something happening here or there but everywhere, and all at once. And unless we choose to halt it, it will never stop.

it is another thing entirely to 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.

Each day we arm it more.

But we have for so long understood stories about nature as allegories that we seem unable to recognize that the meaning of climate change is not sequestered in parable.

There is nothing to learn from global warming, because we do not have the time, or the distance, to contemplate its lessons; we are after all not merely telling the story but living it. That is, trying to; the threat is immense.

Global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization. First, the project of remaking the planet so that it is undeniably ours, a project whose exhaust, the poison of emissions, now casually works its way through millennia of ice so quickly you can see the melt with a naked eye, destroying the environmental conditions that have held stable and steadily governed for literally all of human history. That has been the work of a single generation. The second generation faces a very different task: the project of preserving our collective future, forestalling that devastation and engineering an alternate path. There is simply no analogy to draw on, outside of mythology and theology—and perhaps the Cold War prospect of mutually assured destruction.

choosing to ignore the bleakest features of our possible future and letting our political fatalism and technological faith blur, as though we’d gone cross-eyed, into a remarkably familiar consumer fantasy: that someone else will fix the problem for us, at no cost.

that we know we are, ourselves, responsible for all of its punishing effects should be empowering, and not just perversely. Global warming is, after all, a human invention. And the flip side of our real-time guilt is that we remain in command.

But the burden of responsibility is too great to be shouldered by a few, however comforting it is to think all that is needed is for a few villains to fall. Each of us imposes some suffering on our future selves every time we flip on a light switch, buy a plane ticket, or fail to vote. Now we all share the responsibility to write the next act.

But climate change is not an ancient crime we are tasked with solving now; we are destroying our planet every day, often with one hand as we conspire to restore it with the other.

we can also stop destroying it, in the same style—collectively, haphazardly, in all the most quotidian ways in addition to the spectacular-seeming ones.

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

Since it is science, it is tentative, ever-evolving, and some of the predictions that follow will surely not come precisely to pass.

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.

But at just five degrees, according to some calculations, whole parts of the globe would be literally unsurvivable for humans.

You do not need to consider worst-case scenarios to become alarmed.

“person-days”: a unit that combines the number of people affected with the number of days.

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.

Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves.

It has become commonplace among climate activists to say that we have, today, all the tools we need to avoid catastrophic climate change—even major climate change. It is also true. But political will is not some trivial ingredient, always at hand. We have the tools we need to solve global poverty, epidemic disease, and abuse of women, as well.

“carrying capacity”: How much population can a given environment ultimately support before collapsing or degrading from overuse?

Global warming, in other words, is more than just one input in an equation to determine carrying capacity; it is the set of conditions under which all of our experiments to improve that capacity will be conducted.

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

“We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”

“hidden hunger”—micronutrient and dietary deficiencies—is considerably higher, affecting well over 1 billion people.

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.

Overall, the researchers found that, acting just through that single crop, rice, carbon emissions could imperil the health of 600 million people.

But as “familiar” as sea-level rise may seem, it surely deserves its place at the center of the picture of what damage climate change will bring.

the inevitability of extended nuclear war—because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will unleash.

Climate change may not only make the miles along the American coast uninsurable, it could render obsolete the very idea of disaster insurance;

Whatever the course of climate change, China will surely continue its ascent, but it will do so while fighting back the ocean, as well—perhaps one reason it is already so focused on establishing control over the South China Sea.

Already, flooding has quadrupled since 1980,

And even though we now have a decent picture of the planet’s climatological past, 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.

“albedo effect”: ice is white and so reflects sunlight back into space rather than absorbing it; the less ice, the more sunlight is absorbed as global warming; and the total disappearance of that ice, Peter Wadhams has estimated, could mean a massive warming equivalent to the entire last twenty-five years of global carbon emissions.

All of this is speculative. But our uncertainty over each of these dynamics—ice sheet collapse, Arctic methane, the albedo effect—clouds our understanding only of the pace of change, not its scale. In fact, we do know what the endgame for oceans looks like, just not how long it will take us to get there.

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.

A paradise dreamscape erected in a barren desert, L.A. has always been an impossible city,

For a time, we had come to believe that civilization moved in the other direction—making the impossible first possible and then stable and routine. With climate change, we are moving instead toward nature, and chaos, into a new realm unbounded by the analogy of any human experience.