The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

But most wars throughout history, it is important to remember, have been conflicts over resources, often ignited by resource scarcity, which is what an earth densely populated and denuded by climate change will yield.

the impacts will be greatest in the world’s least developed, most impoverished, and therefore least resilient nations—almost literally a story of the world’s rich drowning the world’s poor with their waste.

Among this outwardly conscientious cohort, there is much worry about bringing new children into a degraded world, full of suffering, and about “contributing” to the problem by crowding the climate stage with more players, each a little consumption machine.

The horizons are just as open to us, however foreclosed and foreordained they may seem. But we close them off when we say anything about the future being inevitable. What may sound like stoic wisdom is often an alibi for indifference.

Perhaps the most predictable vector is trauma: between a quarter and a half of all those exposed to extreme weather events will experience them as an ongoing negative shock to their mental health.

Even those watching the effects from the sidelines suffer from climate trauma. “I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,”

In the sense of psychological distress, which so many of them endure, climate scientists are the canaries in our coal mine.

Climate affects both the onset and the severity of depression,

But instead we have responded to scientists channeling the planet’s cries for mercy as though they were simply crying wolf.

we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination.

we can be mesmerized by the threat directly in front of us without ever perceiving it clearly.

On-screen, climate devastation is everywhere you look, and yet nowhere in focus, as though we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control—per...

A form of emotional prophylaxis is also at work: in fictional stories of climate catastrophe we may also be looking for catharsis, and collectively trying to persuade ourselves we might survive it.

“cli-fi”: genre fiction sounding environmental alarm, didactic adventure stories, often preachy in their politics.

almost everything about our broader narrative culture suggests that climate change is a major mismatch of a subject for all the tools we have at hand.

We know the meaning of extreme weather and natural disaster, now, though they still arrive with a kind of prophetic majesty: the meaning is that there is more to come, and that it is our doing.

Global warming isn’t something that might happen, should several people make some profoundly shortsighted calculations; it is something that is already happening, everywhere, and without anything like direct supervisors.

at present the world’s wealthy possess the lion’s share of guilt—the richest 10 percent producing half of all emissions.

This distribution tracks closely with global income inequality, which is one reason that many on the Left point to the all-encompassing system, saying that industrial capitalism is to blame. It is. But saying so does not name an antagonist; it names a toxic investment vehicle with most of the world as stakeholders, many of whom eagerly bought in. And who in fact quite enjoy their present way of life.

American inaction surely slowed global progress on climate in a time when the world had only one superpower. But there is simply nothing like climate denialism beyond the U.S. border, which encloses the production of only 15 percent of the world’s emissions. To believe the fault for global warming lies exclusively with the Republican Party or its fossil fuel backers is a form of American narcissism.

One message of climate change is: you do not live outside the scene but within it, subject to all the same horrors you can see afflicting the lives of animals.

“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.

Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015. 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.

But global warming carries a message more concerning still: that we didn’t defeat the environment at all.

In fact, the opposite: Whatever it means for the other animals on the planet, with global warming we have unwittingly claimed ownership of a system beyond our ability to control or tame in any day-to-day way. But more than that: with our continued activity, we have rendered that system only more out of control.

James Hansen, who first testified before Congress about global warming in 1988, has named the phenomenon “scientific reticence,” and in 2007 chastised his colleagues for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was.

2017 Nature paper surveying the full breadth of the academic literature: that despite a strong consensus among climate scientists about “hope” and “fear” and what qualifies as responsible storytelling, there is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try. Any story that sticks is a good one.

The thing that was new was the message: It is okay, finally, to freak out. It is almost hard to imagine, in its aftermath, anything but a new torrent of panic, issuing forth from scientists finally emboldened to scream as they wish to.

Scientists spent decades presenting the unambiguous data, demonstrating to anyone who would listen just what kind of crisis will come for the planet if nothing is done, and then watched, year after year, as nothing was done.

If only they were in charge, they would know exactly what to do, and there would be no need to panic. So why wouldn’t anyone listen to them? It had to be the rhetoric. What other explanation could there be?

We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.

a map of human reason as an awkward kluge, blindly self-regarding and self-defeating, curiously effective at some things and maddeningly incompetent when it comes to others; compromised and misguided and tattered. How did we ever put a man on the moon?

That climate change demands expertise, and faith in it, at precisely the moment when public confidence in expertise is collapsing, is another of its historical ironies.

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,”

Big things make us feel small, and rather powerless, even if we are nominally “in charge.”

To some, even ending trillions in fossil fuel subsidies sounds harder to pull off than deploying technologies to suck carbon out of the air everywhere on Earth.

we are more intimidated by the monsters we create than those we inherit.

we expect we should be able to protect the dwindling population of an endangered species, and preserve their habitat, should we choose to, and that we should be able to manage an abundant water supply, rather than see it wasted on the way to human mouths—again, should we choose to.

we tend to think of climate as somehow being contained within, or governed by, capitalism. In fact, the opposite: capitalism is endangered by climate.

But the downward revision of expectations for the future may be still more important than diminished prosperity in the present.

Already, in the United States, courts are awash in a wave of lawsuits aimed at extracting climate damages—a

The most high-profile are the torts brought against oil companies by crusading attorneys general—public health claims, more or less, put forward by the public or at least in its name, against companies known to have engaged in disinformation and political-influence campaigns.

This is the first vector of climate liability: against the corporatio...

Juliana v. the United States, also known as “Kids vs. Climate,” an ingenious equal-protection lawsuit alleging that in failing to take action against global warming, the federal government effectively shifted many decades’ worth of environmental costs onto today’s young—an

This is the second vector of climate liability: against the generations that have profited.

But there is also a third vector, yet to be litigated in any more formal setting than the conference rooms in which the Paris accords were negotiated: against the nations that have profited from burning fossil fuels, in some cases to the tune of whole empires.

But there has been little acknowledgment yet that the wealthy nations of the West owe any climate debt to the poor nations who will suffer most from warming.

We do not yet know, of course, just how much suffering global warming will inflict, but the scale of devastation could make that debt enormous, by any measure—larger,

Of course, present political arrangements, not to mention bankruptcy law, will conspire to limit climate liability—for oil companies, for governments, for nations.