The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas.

The U.N. projections are bleaker: 200 million climate refugees by 2050.

this is what results when there are simply that many more humans around, each walking the earth with carbon footprints.

The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead.

they are already accumulating, at a rate of at least seven million deaths, from air pollution alone, each year—an annual Holocaust, pursued and prosecuted by what brand of nihilism?

the flip side of our real-time guilt is that we remain in command.

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.

to have hopes of two degrees, we need to open new full-scale carbon capture plants at the pace of one and a half per day every day for the next seventy years.

the world needs to cut its meat and dairy consumption in half by 2050;

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.

Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets—enough to add 10,000 cubic meters of water to the ocean. Every minute, each of us adds five gallons.

With climate change, we are moving instead toward nature, and chaos, into a new realm unbounded by the analogy of any human experience.

(Every round-trip plane ticket from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.)

The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us,”

“It was a simple and attractive tale, but it is now collapsing, and so far no new story has emerged to fill the vacuum.”

“Man-made weather is never made in the present,”

I would burn my right hand in a slow fire To change the future…I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern Man is not in the persons but in the Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

“What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric.”

“And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time?”

“Withdrawing” is the darker half of the same admonition:

“The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.”

You can’t choose the planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.