The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

But in 2018, Burke and several other colleagues published a major paper exploring the growth consequences of some scenarios closer to our present predicament. In it, they considered one plausible but still quite optimistic scenario, in which the world meets its Paris Agreement commitments, limiting warming to between 2.5 and 3 degrees. This is probably about the best-case warming scenario we might reasonably expect; globally, relative to a world with no additional warming, it would cut per-capita economic output by the end of the century, Burke and his colleagues estimate, by between 15 and 25 percent. Hitting four degrees of warming, which lies on the low end of the range of warming implied by our current emissions trajectory, would cut into it by 30 percent or more. This is a trough twice as deep as the deprivations that scarred our grandparents in the 1930s, and which helped produce a wave of fascism, authoritarianism, and genocide.