The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

The upper end of the probability curve put forward by the U.N. to estimate the end-of-the-century, high emissions scenario—the worst-case outcome of a worst-case path—puts us at eight degrees. Warming of that level would require a suicidal cocktail of sadistic policy, public indifference, and catastrophic luck. But at eight degrees, humans at the equator and in the tropics would not be able to move around without dying; hardly any land on the planet would be capable of efficiently producing any of the food we now eat; forests would be roiled by rolling storms of fire, and coasts would be punished by more and more intense hurricanes; the suffocating hood of tropical disease would reach northward to enclose parts of what we now call the Arctic; probably about a third of the planet would be made unlivable by direct heat; and what are today literally unprecedented and intolerable droughts and heat waves would be the quotidian condition of whatever human life was able to endure.