The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

For much of the book’s prologue, he writes in a past tense rendered from an imagined, devastated future. “Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say,” he writes. “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”

predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: both unprecedented droughts and unprecedented flood-producing rains.

China has invested in truly customized farming strategies to boost productivity and cut the use of greenhouse-gas-producing fertilizer;

“Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze told Politico,

“We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history—[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

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. Ev...

If the world tracks a very high emissions path, one estimate of global damages is as high as $100 trillion per year by 2100. That is more than global GDP today.

All told, at just 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, flood damage would increase by between 160 and 240 percent; at 2 degrees, the death toll from flooding would be 50 percent higher than today.

Without flood adaptation measures, large swaths of northern Europe and the whole eastern half of the United States will be affected by at least ten times as many floods.

the Black Sea deluge 7,600 years ago—reputedly so dramatic and catastrophic a flood that it may have given rise to our Noah’s Ark story.

When the Paris Agreement was drafted, those writing it were sure that the Antarctic ice sheets would remain stable even as the planet warmed several degrees; their expectation was that oceans could rise, at most, only three feet by the end of the century. That was just in 2015. The same year, NASA found that this expectation was hopelessly complacent, suggesting three feet was not a maximum but in fact a minimum. In 2017, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggested eight feet was possible—still just in this century.

All climate change is governed by uncertainty, mostly the uncertainty of human action—what action will be taken, and when, to avert or forestall the dramatic transformation of life on the planet that will unfold in the absence of dramatic intervention.

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.

At present, the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year. But in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil promising to open the rain forest to development—which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? A group of Brazilian scientists has estimated that between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release the equivalent of 13.12 gigatons of carbon. Last year, the United States emitted about 5 gigatons. This means that this one policy would have between two and three times the annual carbon impact of the entire American economy, with all of its airplanes and automobiles and coal plants. The world’s worst emitter, by far, is China; the country was responsible for 9.1 gigatons of emissions in 2017. This means Bolsonaro’s policy is the equivalent of adding, if just for a year, a whole second China to the planet’s fossil fuel problem—and, on top of that, a whole second United States.

every square kilometer of deforestation produces twenty-seven additional cases of malaria, thanks to what is called “vector proliferation”—when the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in.

it is the cascading chaos that reveals the true cruelty of climate change—it can upend and turn violently against us everything we have ever thought to be stable.

In a three-degree-warmer world, the earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage.

extreme weather is not a matter of “normal”; it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events. This is among the scariest features of rapid climate change: not that it changes the everyday experience of the world, though it does that, and dramatically; but that it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible.

it is now estimated that New York City will suffer “500-year” floods once every twenty-five years.

The climate effects on extreme precipitation events—often called deluges or even “rain bombs”—are even clearer than those on hurricanes, since the mechanism is about as straightforward as it gets: warmer air can hold more moisture than cooler air. Already, there are 40 percent more intense rainstorms in the United States than in the middle of the last century. In the Northeast, the figure is 71 percent.

Which does call into question just what we mean, in the age of the Anthropocene, by the phrase “natural disaster.”

The five-year Syrian drought that stretched from 2006 to 2011, producing crop failures that created political instability and helped usher in the civil war that produced a global refugee crisis, is one vivid example.

Gleick is personally more focused on the strange war unfolding in Yemen since 2015—technically a civil war, but practically a proxy regional war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and conceptually a sort of world war in miniature, with American and Russian involvement as well.

But the ocean isn’t the other; we are. Water is not a beachside attraction for land animals: at 70 percent of the earth’s surface it is, by an enormous margin, the planet’s predominant environment.

One study tracing human impact on marine life found only 13 percent of the ocean undamaged,

parts of the Arctic have been so transformed by warming that scientists are beginning to wonder how long they can keep calling those waters “arctic.”

According to the World Resources Institute, by 2030 ocean warming and acidification will threaten 90 percent of all reefs.

Hydrogen sulfide is also one of the things scientists suspect finally capped the end-Permian extinction, once all the feedback loops had been triggered. It is so toxic that evolution has trained us to recognize the tiniest, safest traces, which is why our noses are so exquisitely skilled at registering flatulence.

Already, more than 10,000 people die from air pollution daily. That is considerably more each day—each day—than the total number of people who have ever been affected by the meltdowns of nuclear reactors.

A higher pollution level in the year a baby is born has been shown to reduce earnings and labor force participation at age thirty,

the relationship of pollution to premature births and low birth weight of babies is so strong that the simple introduction of E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems, in the vicinity of toll plazas, by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, just by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars slowed to pay the toll.

The Black Death killed as much as 60 percent of Europe, but consider, for a gruesome counterfactual, how big its impact might have been in a truly globalized world.

Scientists guess the planet could harbor more than a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses.

in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a number of historians and iconoclastic economists studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have started to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of innovation or the dynamics of free trade, but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power—a onetime injection of that new “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by unending subsistence living.

In 2018, the World Bank estimated that the current path of carbon emissions would sharply diminish the living conditions of 800 million living throughout South Asia. One hundred million, they say, will be dragged into extreme poverty by climate change just over the next decade. Perhaps “back into” is more appropriate: many of the most vulnerable are those populations that have just extracted themselves from deprivation and subsistence living, through developing-world growth powered by industrialization and fossil fuel.

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

Over the last several decades, policy consensus has cautioned that the world would only tolerate responses to climate change if they were free—or, even better, if they could be presented as avenues of economic opportunity. That market logic was probably always shortsighted, but over the last several years, as the cost of adaptation in the form of green energy has fallen so dramatically, the equation has entirely flipped: we now know that it will be much, much more expensive to not act on climate than to take even the most aggressive action today.

But wars are not caused by climate change only in the same way that hurricanes are not caused by climate change, which is to say they are made more likely, which is to say the distinction is semantic.

The Center for Climate and Security, a state-focused think tank, organizes the threats from climate change into six categories: “Catch-22 states,” in which governments have responded to local climate challenges—to agriculture, for example—by turning toward a global marketplace that is now more than ever vulnerable to climate shocks; “brittle states,” stable on the surface—but only by a run of good climate luck; “fragile states,” such as Sudan, Yemen, and Bangladesh, where climate impacts have already eaten into trust in state authority, or worse; “disputed zones among states,” like the South China Sea or Arctic; “disappearing states,” which they mean literally, as in the case of the Maldives; and “non-state actors,” like ISIS, which can seize local resources, such as freshwater, as a way of applying leverage against the nominal state authority or the local population.

The hotter it gets, the longer drivers will honk their horns in frustration; and even in simulations, police officers are more likely to fire on intruders when the exercises are conducted in hotter weather.

By 2099, one speculative paper tabulated, climate change in the United States could bring about an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 rapes, 3.5 million assaults, and 3.76 million robberies, burglaries, and acts of larceny.

In 2018, a team of researchers examining an enormous data set of more than 9,000 American cities found that air pollution levels positively predicted incidents of every single crime category they looked at—from car theft and burglary and larceny up to assault, rape, and murder.

By 2100, sea-level rise alone could displace 13 million Americans—a

More than 140 million people in just three regions of the world will be made climate migrants by 2050, the World Bank projected in a 2018 study, assuming current warming and emissions trends: 86 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, and 17 million in Latin America.

But of course further degradation isn’t inescapable; it is optional. Each new baby arrives in a brand-new world, contemplating a whole horizon of possibilities. The perspective is not naive. We live in that world with them—helping make it for them, and with them, and for ourselves. The next decades are not yet determined. A new timer begins with every birth, measuring how much more damage will be done to the planet and the life this child will live on it. 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.

Thirty-two weeks after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, killing forty, more than half of children surveyed had moderate PTSD and more than a third had a severe form; in the high-impact areas, 70 percent of children scored in the moderate-to-severe range fully twenty-one months after the Category 5 storm. By dismal contrast, soldiers returning from war are estimated to suffer from PTSD at a rate between 11 and 31 percent.

a world just one degree warmer; a world not yet deformed and defaced beyond recognition; a world bound largely by conventions devised in an age of climate stability, now barreling headlong into an age of something more like climate chaos, a world we are only beginning to perceive.

Today, the movies may be millenarian, but when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. This is climate’s kaleidoscope: we can be mesmerized by the threat directly in front of us without ever perceiving it clearly.

Presumably, as climate change colonizes and darkens our lives and our world, it will do the same for our nonfiction, so much so that climate change may come to be regarded, at least by some, as the only truly serious subject.