The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

The fact that warming is now hitting our wealthiest citizens is not just an opportunity for ugly bursts of liberal schadenfreude; it is also a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting. All of a sudden, it’s getting a lot harder to protect against what’s coming.

“We don’t even call it fire season anymore,” he said in 2017. “Take the ‘season’ out—it’s year-round.”

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.

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.

In California, a single wildfire can entirely eliminate the emissions gains made that year by all of the state’s aggressive environmental policies.

when the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in.

The fires should be terrorizing enough, but it is the cascading chaos that reveals the true cruelty of climate change—it can upend and turn violently against us everything we have ever thought to be stable.

“deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature.

But extreme weather is not a matter of “normal”; it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events.

it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible.

“We’re getting some intimations of how the ruling class intends to handle the accumulating disasters of the Anthropocene,” as the cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, of the New School, wrote. “We’re on our own.”

We tell ourselves we are “developing” the land—in some cases, fabricating it from marsh. What we are really building are bridges to our own suffering, since it’s not just those new concrete communities built right into the floodplain that are vulnerable, but all those communities behind them, built on the expectation that the old swampy coastline could protect them.

There is no need for a water crisis, in other words, but we have one anyway, and aren’t doing much to address it.

But of all urban entitlements, the casual expectation of never-ending drinking water is perhaps the most deeply delusional.

In fact, the World Bank, in its landmark study of water and climate change “High and Dry,” found that “the impacts of climate change will be channeled primarily through the water cycle.”

“If climate change is a shark, the water resources are the teeth.”

But the ocean isn’t the other; we are. Water is not a beachside attraction for land animals: at 70 percent of the earth’s surface it is, by an enormous margin, the planet’s predominant environment.

One study tracing human impact on marine life found only 13 percent of the ocean undamaged,

coral life has declined so much that it has created an entirely new layer in the ocean, between 30 and 150 meters below the surface, which scientists have taken to calling a “twilight zone.”

This is very bad news, because reefs support as much as a quarter of all marine life and supply food and income for half a billion people.

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.

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”;

it is a startling mark of just how all-encompassing our regime of carbon pollution really is, enclosing the planet in a toxic swaddle.

The public health damage is indiscriminate, touching nearly every human vulnerability: pollution increases prevalence of stroke, heart disease, cancer of all kinds, acute and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma, and adverse pregnancy outcomes, including premature birth.

air pollution has been linked to worse memory, attention, and vocabulary, and to ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. Pollution has been shown to damage the development of neurons in the brain, and proximity to a coal plant can deform your DNA.

The microscopic bits—700,000 of them can be released into the surrounding environment by a single washing-machine cycle—are more insidious.

A majority of fish tested in the Great Lakes contained microplastics, as did the guts of 73 percent of fish surveyed in the northwest Atlantic.

one researcher found 225 pieces of plastic in the stomach of a single three-month-old chick, weighing 10 percent of its body mass—the equivalent of an average human carrying about ten to twenty pounds of plastic in a distended belly.

“Around the world, seabirds are declining faster than any other bird group.”)

The more we test, the more we find; and while nobody yet knows the health impact on humans, in the oceans a plastic microbead is said to be one million times more toxic than the water around it.

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.

plastics are produced by industrial activity that also produces pollutants, including carbon dioxide.

when plastics degrade, they release methane and ethylene, another powerful greenhouse gas.

“aerosol pollution”—the blanket term for any particles suspended in our atmosphere.

polluting the air on purpose to keep the planet cooler. Often grouped together under the umbrella term “geoengineering,”

The Black Death killed as much as 60 percent of Europe, but consider, for a gruesome counterfactual, how big its impact might have been in a truly globalized world.

Scientists guess the planet could harbor more than a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses.

The global halving of economic resources would be permanent, and, because permanent, we would soon not even know it as deprivation, only as a brutally cruel normal against which we might measure tiny burps of decimal-point growth as the breath of a new prosperity.

One speculative possibility: computers have made us more efficient and productive, but at the same time climate change has had the opposite effect, diminishing or wiping out entirely the impact of technology.

But the world’s suffering will be distributed as unequally as its profits, with great divergences both between countries and within them.

in part because it has so much to lose, and in part because it so aggressively developed its very long coastlines, the U.S. is more vulnerable to climate impacts than any country in the world but India, and its economic illness won’t be quarantined at the border.

we now know that it will be much, much more expensive to not act on climate than to take even the most aggressive action today.

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.

for every half degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict.

Given the right war-gaming cast of mind, it is also possible to see the aggressive Chinese construction activity in the South China Sea, where whole new artificial islands have been erected for military use, as a kind of dry run, so to speak, for life as a superpower in a flooded world.

Like the cost to growth, war is not a discrete impact of global temperature rise but something more like an all-encompassing aggregation of climate change’s worst tremors and cascades.

climate is not the sole cause but the spark igniting a complex bundle of social kindling.

in the West especially, we are unable to appreciate human progress—are in fact blind to all of the massive and rapid improvements the world has witnessed in less violence and war and poverty, reduced infant mortality, and enhanced life expectancy.

Worse still, the warming unleashed by all our progress heralds a return to violence.