The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas.

And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.

more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.

The United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992, building a political consensus out of a scientific consensus and advertising it unmistakably to the world; this means we have now done as much damage to the environment knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance.

if the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation, too.

Beginning in 2011, about one million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought—and in a very real sense, much of the “populist moment” the entire West is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants.

And then there will be the refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the rest of South Asia—140 million by 2050, the World Bank estimates, meaning more than a hundred times Europe’s Syrian “crisis.”

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

the high end of what’s possible in the next thirty years, the United Nations says, is even worse: “a billion or more vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.” A billion or more. That was the entire global population as recently as 1820, with the Industrial Revolution well under way.

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

when we dismiss the worst-case possibilities, it distorts our sense of likelier outcomes, which we then regard as extreme scenarios we needn’t plan so conscientiously for.

the optimists have never, in the half century of climate anxiety we’ve already endured, been right.

We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I’d always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I’d also always had.

Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture;

You might hope to simply reverse climate change; you can’t. It will outrun all of us.

This is part of what makes climate change what the theorist Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”—a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended.

Some amount of further warming is already baked in, thanks to the protracted processes by which the planet adapts to greenhouse gas. But all of those paths projected from the present—present—to two degrees, to three, to four or even five—will be carved overwhelmingly by what we choose to do now.

It is tempting to look at these strings of disasters and think, Climate change is here. And one response to seeing things long predicted actually come to pass is to feel that we have settled into a new era, with everything transformed.

The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again.

We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead. And the climate system we have been observing for the last several years, the one that has battered the planet again and again, is not our bleak future in preview. It would be more precise to say that it is a product of our recent climate past, already passing behind us into a dustbin of environmental nostalgia. There is no longer any such thing as a “natural disaster,” but not only will things get worse; technically speaking, they have already gotten worse. Even if, miraculously, humans immediately ceased emitting carbon, we’d still be due for some additional warming from just the stuff we’ve put into the air already. And of course, with global emissions still increasing, we’re very far from zeroing out on carbon, and therefore very far from stalling climate change. The devastation we are now seeing all around us is a beyond-best-case scenario for the future of warming and all the climate disasters it will bring.

Perhaps because of the exhausting false debate about whether climate change is “real,” too many of us have developed a misleading impression that its effects are binary. But global warming is not “yes” or “no,” nor is it “today’s weather forever” or “doomsday tomorrow.” It is a function that gets worse over time as long as we continue to produce greenhouse gas.

If hurricanes of a certain force are now five times as likely as in the pre-Columbian Caribbean, it is parsimonious to the point of triviality to argue over whether this one or that one was “climate-caused.” All hurricanes now unfold in the weather systems we have wrecked on their behalf, which is why there are more of them, and why they are stronger. The same is true for wildfires: this one or that one may be “caused” by a cookout or a downed power line, but each is burning faster, bigger, and longer because of global warming, which gives no reprieve to fire season.

If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.

This is what is meant when climate change is called an “existential crisis”—a drama we are now haphazardly improvising between two hellish poles, in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts, and the worst-case outcome makes extinction a plausible, if unlikely, future. Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we’ve been trained, by a buoyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss, categorically, as hyperbole.

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.

Now we all share the responsibility to write the next act. We found a way to engineer devastation, and we can find a way to engineer our way out of it—or, rather, engineer our way toward a degraded muddle, but one that nevertheless extends forward the promise of new generations finding their own way forward, perhaps toward some brighter environmental future.

Since I first began writing about warming, I’ve often been asked whether I see any reason for optimism. The thing is, I am optimistic. Given the prospect that humans could engineer a climate that is 4 or 5 degrees warmer over the course of the next several centuries—large swaths of the planet unlivable by any def...

Climate change means some bleak prospects for the decades ahead, but I don’t believe the appropriate response to that challenge is withdrawal, is surrender. I think you have to do everything you can to make the world accommodate dignified and flourishing life, rather than giving up early, before the fight has been lost or won, and acclimating yourself to a dreary future brought into being by others less concerned about climate pain.

What cause is there for hope? Carbon hangs in the air for decades, with some of the most terrifying feedbacks unspooling over even longer time horizons—which gives warming the eerie shimmer of an unending menace. But climate change is not an ancient crime we are tasked with solving now; we are destroying our planet every day, often with one hand as we conspire to restore it with the other. Which means, as Paul Hawken has perhaps illustrated most coolheadedly, we can also stop destroying it, in the same style—collectively, haphazardly, in all the most quotidian ways in addition to the spectacular-seeming ones.

These are just a few of the reasons to believe that what the Canadian activist Stuart Parker has called “climate nihilism” is, in fact, another of our delusions. What happens, from here, will be entirely our own doing.

If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half. If the world’s richest 10 percent were limited to that same footprint, global emissions would fall by a third.

We have all already left behind the narrow window of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, but not just evolve—that window has enclosed everything we remember as history, and value as progress, and study as politics.

Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves;

The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002,

air conditioners and fans already account for fully 10 percent of global electricity consumption.

those commitments only get us down to 3.2 degrees; to keep the planet under 2 degrees of warming, all signatory nations have to significantly better their pledges. At present, there are 195 signatories, of which only the following are considered even “in range” of their Paris targets: Morocco, Gambia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines.

China commands half of the planet’s coal-power capacity, with plants that only operate, on average, half of the time—which means their use could quickly grow.

In 2018, Nature dismissed all scenarios built on carbon capture as “magical thinking.”

Projecting future warming is a foolish game, given how many layers of uncertainty govern the outcome; but if a best-case scenario is now somewhere north of 2 degrees of warming by 2100, it seems that the likeliest outcome, the fattest part of the bell curve of probability, sits between 2.5 and 3 degrees, or just a bit above.

Scientists call this the “heat island” effect—each city its own enclosed space, and hotter the more crowded it is.

the world is rapidly urbanizing, with the United Nations estimating that two-thirds of the global population will live in cities by 2050—2.5 billion new urbanites, by that count.

Currently, there are 354 major cities with average maximum summertime temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. By 2050, that list could grow to 970, and the number of people living in those cities and exposed to that deadly heat could grow eightfold, to 1.6 billion.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich made a similar warning, updated for a twenty-first-century planet with many times more people on it, with his widely derided The Population Bomb, which proposed that the economic and agricultural productivity of the earth had already reached its natural limit—and which was published, as it happened, just as the productivity gains from what’s called the “green revolution” were coming into focus.

the writer Charles Mann divides those who respond to the seeming challenge of resource scarcity with reflexive optimism, whom he calls “wizards,” from those who see collapse always around the corner, whom he calls “prophets.”

nearly all of the astonishing productivity gains of the last century trace back to the work of a single man, Norman Borlaug, perhaps the best argument for the humanitarian virtue of America’s imperial century. Born to Iowa family farmers in 1914, he went to state school, found work at DuPont, and then, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed a new collection of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that are now credited with saving the lives of a billion people worldwide. Of course, if those gains were a onetime boost—engineered, in large part, by a single man—how comfortably can we count on future improvements?

But it is one thing to consider what might be the maximum yield of a particular plot of earth and another to contemplate how fully that number is governed by environmental systems—systems far larger and more diffusely determined than even an imperial wizard like Borlaug could reasonably expect to command and control.

Global warming, in other words, is more than just one input in an equation to determine carrying capacity; it is the set of conditions under which all of our experiments to improve that capacity will be conducted.

In this way, climate change appears to be not merely one challenge among many facing a planet already struggling with civil strife and war and horrifying inequality and far too many other insoluble hardships to iterate, but the all-encompassing stage on which all those challenges will be met—a whole sphere, in other words, which literally...

what critic Kris Bartkus has memorably called “the Malthusian tragic”—namely, our inability to see any remaining innocence in the quotidian life of the well-to-do West,

It is the subject of William Vollmann’s grand, two-part Carbon Ideologies, which opens—beyond the epigraph “A crime is something someone else commits,” from Steinbeck—like this: “Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all.”